DekGiudice with the campus plan. Photo Credit: Vincent Arroyo
“Every crack or loose tile I see I’m like ‘man, that’s another thing to fix’,” Professor Thomas DelGiudice says when talking about the New Academic Building. He feels a sense of ownership of it and he should considering he helped design it back in the late 2000s.
DelGiudice is a professor in the Politics, Economics and Law (PEL) department. He attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and received his Ph.D in 1991.
A professor here since 1986, he has a long history with Old Westbury, but it didn’t begin with a teaching gig. He attended the college when it was in its infancy back in the mid-70s, after a stint hitchhiking across America.
He’s a remnant of a time long passed, an older jovial hippie, but time has not slowed him down in any way. In his classes, DelGiudice ensures that all students understand what is on the board, often an elaborate diagram. Then, like a Tibetan Buddhist blowing away their sand mandala, he erases all those graphs in a moment.
DelGiudice had a ton of different career paths he could’ve taken; he studied to be an architect, he was a jock, “I was almost a monk,” he chuckles. So why economics? To figure this out, I had a couple of conversations with him to learn about one of Old Westbury’s most interesting professors.
A Long Island native, DelGiudice grew up in Bellmore and was, ironically, an athlete in high school. “But I wasn’t a super jock,” he says, “I just liked playing sports.”
He and a friend got into Eastern philosophy (reading The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau), and he became serious about it. “I was really serious about that for 12 years,” he says. “It might seem cliche but I was a child of that era [the 60s & 70s].” He still meditates, but says he was really into it back then.
He even joined a group, Ananda Marga, led by a guru, P.R. Sarkar. “We were into meditation and service,” he explained. “So, it wasn’t just about finding, you know, peace inside yourself. You have to bring it; it’s like a dialectical process. You have to serve others too, and have to be selfless.”
As a part of Ananda Marga, he used the profits from a business selling leather Disco-Bags to open a home for abused adolescents. This struck a chord with him and seems to have sewn the seeds of teaching that would bear fruits later.
Coming to OW in 1976 was an important moment for him. “[Long Island] was pretty segregated back then,” he said. “It was the first time I was in an integrated community, and they were pretty radical.”
OW was a lot smaller in those days which made the roughly thousand students like a family, according to DelGiudice. “[We’d] have a Mayday festival on the terrace and Old Academic Village,” he continued, “and it would just be a huge party.”
This was a committed, progressive student body that pushed for serious change on campus. “It was like ‘What’s happening?,’ we were all looking at each other,” he said. “When we didn’t like what the campus was doing, we protested, we made changes.”
The faculty were progressive too, and DelGiudice says they made him into the man he is today. “I was a more serious student at that time. My teachers saw that and really encouraged me to go to graduate school and study economics,” he said. “I really have a big debt to them, and I try to carry on that legacy a bit.”
One of these mentors was the recently passed Dr. Gloria Young Sing. “She was the toughest thing. You got an A in her class, you really felt good about yourself,” he said, “I don’t even think I got an A, but she was the one that talked me into coming to teach here.”
He took a trip to India in his senior year at OW. “I worked in these villages and I meditated,” he said. “We worked with all kinds of people from a leprosy colony, to schools, to orphanages; it was a great experience.”
DelGiudice took part in a worldwide hunger strike in 1978 to protest Indira Gandhi’s political oppression and other human rights abuses in India. “The fasting was just the three of us, fasting in different cities around the world.” There he sat, at the foot of the Capitol building, subsisting on lemon water and honey. Senators, like South Carolina’s segregationist Strom Thurmond, stepped over him as they went into the building. “[Thurmond] said, ‘We don’t need anyone dying here on the steps of the capitol,’ and that sorta thing.”
“I [hitchhiked] back in ‘71-‘72,” he said. “It was fun, I don’t know if I would recommend it to people but I had lots of adventures.” These adventures were like something from a 60s beatnik novel. Assorted hijinks include driving through the Rocky Mountains with other long-haired vagabonds in a hunk of junk car with no gas pedal. “We tied a rope to the engine, through the hole where the pedal was and tied a flashlight to it,” he explained. “One guy had to do the clutch and another had to do the gas; as long as we were on the highway it wasn’t too bad,” he laughed.
DelGuidice rode a bus in Nepal through one of the deadliest mountain roads on the planet. “It was so scary,” he said. “[We] were going over the Himalayas, into Kathmandu, and it’s one lane, and these fearless sikh drivers,” he said. “But in the bus, it’s peasants with chickens and people throwing up. You [look into a ditch] and see a bus that’d rolled down. It’s like, God, you could die here!” Suffice to say, he’s lived like the young dream – without bounds.
When he became a teacher at O.W. in ‘86, he tried to carry on the legacy of his professors. “I did a lot of extracurricular stuff, I had a lot of energy,” he said. He even brought some high profile people to speak on campus, like Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, and Susan Meiselas, among others. “We had these teach-ins, it was pretty cool,” he said. “I was looking at this old stuff and we would just take over the school for a couple of days, like there was some violence on campus, so we did a big teach-in on violence and safety.” DelGiudice even received a Professor of the Year award from the Student Government Association (SGA) in 1988.
During this time, DelGiudice felt that the leadership was weak. “I was unhappy with that, real unhappy.” But in 2000, OW got a new president, Dr. Calvin Butts III. “I went to him and I told him what I thought was wrong with the school and he listened,” DelGiudice said. “[Dr. Butts] asked me if I would play a role fixing up the technology element of [the school], so I said yea I’ll do that.”
A few years later in 2005 he was asked to be a part of Capital Planning for the whole campus. “We got about $187 million and in eight years, we changed the whole campus around, even built [the N.A.B.],” he said. DelGiudice described the old campus as “embarrassing to the students, embarrassing to the faculty…the place was such a mess, physically.”
He was able to accomplish a lot, like planning the remodeling of the Campus Center and construction of the University Police building. “It was a super busy time, we never got that much money before,” he explained. Part of this efficiency is because of the money, but it’s also because of the trust others had in him. “The faculty seemed to trust me…SUNY Albany and the construction fund trusted me,” he continued. “So we were able to accomplish a tremendous amount in a very short time.”
Eventually, though, he wanted a way out. “It was a 24/7 job, when you’re spending that kind of money” he chuckled, “Faculty would be coming at me every minute, I’d get phone calls at a baseball game from contractors.” It quickly became clear to him that this was not why he got his Ph.D and not what he became a teacher for. “I told Dr. Butts, when the building opens I’m going back to teaching,” he said. “But I was so grateful because…I could make a real contribution.”
As a product of his generation, DelGiudice has protested for what he believes in whether it’s an issue across the ocean, or here in America. In recent years, he has held teach-ins on Trump and his policies. “When Trump got elected I was really outraged,” he said. So he proposed an idea: could the school open up every classroom and have the teachers give lessons about the election, not necessarily anti-Trump, but just about the election? “Not every faculty did it, but a lot did.”
This led to an interesting internal conflict he’s been having with teaching as of late: with the ballooning student body, how many actually care? “I think [the teach-ins] are good for solidarity with the faculty and students, but do they care?” he asked rhetorically. “Probably some do, but most don’t. But at least they’re being exposed [to the ideas].” He goes on to say that some students treat undergrad like high school: you come in, put your head down, pass the test, and go on with your life. And that’s certainly true, but it’s because the job market demands at least a Bachelor’s Degree… but I digress.
From high school athlete to hitchhiking yogi to economics professor, this evolution is seemingly contradictory, but they all involve a key trait: being a part of something greater than yourself. The communal, selfless, experience-driven nature of occupations like playing a team sport or being in a meditation group or even a teacher, is the unifying characteristic of these jobs.
Professor DelGiudice is the kind of professor a student doesn’t get too often – a guiding light that points promising academics the way they should. A North Star professor, as it were. When asked what advice he has for students he says: “I got good advice [from my professors] so I’d give them the same advice: be serious about it, take yourself seriously. Your brain is your ticket. You gotta figure out what your talent is, and that might take a little life experience, but once you find that just go at it, 100%.” He continued, “Get the skills so that when a good wave comes along, you can surf that wave and take it to a good life.”
DelGiudice is still looking to create memorable experiences for the students. He talked about a potential teach-in during September for the 2024 election. Just recently, on April 15, he held a small gathering of PEL-minded students and watched a Jon Stewart Daily Show episode during common hour. There was a lively discussion from members of the PEL Club and other newcomers, about the current socio-political situation in America. He is still here for the students and, hopefully, the students will still be here for him.
