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Campus History The year was 1955 and about 200 freshman and transfer
students decided to take the educational gamble of a lifetime. They
enrolled in a brand new college that was not accredited, had no
traditions and provided classroom learning in former horse stables
and root cellars.
Described by one student as "something out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel," the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University resembled anything but a college. With a stately mansion, rolling green lawns, and formal gardens, the 128-acre campus was the former home of one of the world's richest women, the Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post Cereal Company fortune and daughter of its founder, Charles William Post. There were no funds to build permanent buildings so classes were held in Mrs. Post's magnificent 59-room Tudor mansion and in an adjacent guest house. Classrooms were actually bedrooms and servants' quarters, some still equipped with fireplaces and bathroom sinks with gold plated faucets. Students also made do with classrooms that were former root cellars and horse stables, as well as a parking lot that the first students called a mudhole. Despite these hardships most early alumni recall how enthusiastic they were about making their mark in this young college's history. "It was a wonderful experience and great fun,"
said John Capra, '59, senior class president and a member of C.W.
Post's first four-year graduating class. "Spirits and morale
were high because we were starting everything from scratch. How
many people can say they attended a college when it was just getting
started?" Long Island University's Struggle to Establish a College Campus The establishment of the C.W. Post Campus is an extension of an extraordinary story that began in 1926 with the founding of Long Island University. The University got its start in Brooklyn to serve an urban population of first-generation college students. It was among the first universities to offer evening and weekend classes for working adult students. Weakened financially by the Great Depression, the Brooklyn Campus survived World War II by offering Navy training and managing other war-related projects. After the war, the face of Long Island changed rapidly. Factories and new suburbs sprouted up from old potato fields. The estates of early twentieth century tycoons were sold by their heirs for housing developments. The Long Island Expressway snaked eastward from New York City, eventually providing a high-capacity auto route all the way from the Queens Midtown Tunnel and Manhattan to Eastern Long Island. Long Island University shared in the growth and prosperity of booming Long Island. Lifted on the wings of the GI Bill of Rights which offered federal financial aid to ex-GIs, the Brooklyn campus was soon overflowing with a new generation of students, older than their prewar counterparts, many of them married, intent on getting an education and moving on with their lives. To serve this new generation, the leaders of Long Island University proposed to build an all-new campus in Nassau County, just as LIU's far-sighted founders had envisioned when they wrote the university's original charter in the 1920s. In May 1947, one of the notable estates of Long Island's famed Gold Coast became available for purchase. The owner was Marjorie Merriweather Post, former wife of Joseph E. Davies who had served as the U.S.'s wartime ambassador to the Soviet Union. The property, known as the Joseph E. Davies Estate, consisted of 128 landscaped acres and the 59-room Tudor style mansion where the family had made its home, along with gardens and related buildings. Mrs. Post offered the property to the university for the bargain price of $260,000.
For its part, the university proposed to name its
new branch the C.W. Post College of Long Island University, honoring
Mrs. Post's father, Charles W. Post, who had invented and marketed
several wildly popular grain-based food products including the breakfast
cereals Post Toasties and Grape Nuts. Mrs. Post, heir to her father and a brilliant business executive in her own right, added frozen foods, Jell-O, Maxwell House Coffee and other now well-known brands to her father's business line, and built his company into an international enterprise now known as Kraft General Foods. The Long Island University administration petitioned the zoning board of the Town of Oyster Bay for clearance to purchase the Davies estate in an area that is now part of Brookville. This seemingly simple legal procedure touched off immediate opposition from a small group of estate owners in the vicinity who were worried about the influx of students. They insisted the Zoning Board uphold the restrictions in Oyster Bay's 18-year-old zoning laws, which allowed property in the Brookville area to be used for "schools" but not for "universities." Unable to foresee the cultural and educational benefits of a neighborhood college, the landowners took their case to court. The conflict came to be known as the Battle of Oyster Bay. After years of hearings and appeals, the matter
was finally settled in 1954 by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which
authorized the university to open its new college. Even before the
final court decision, the university had signaled its confidence
in its ultimate victory by completing the purchase of the Davies
estate for $200,000, $60,000 less than the original asking offer. 1955 - Classes Begin at C.W. Post By the fall of 1955, C.W. Post had signed up 14
faculty members and 219 students. For four years, while the administration
struggled to raise construction funds, classes were held in the
buildings Mrs. Post had built. One professor, Newton Meiselman,
a biologist, recalls that a classroom in a former servants' dining
room had an electric call board, with signals keyed to respond to
the family's summonses. (No one answered the summonses occasionally
rung by his students.) The Nickname, Colors, Motto and Mascot The new students of C.W. Post eagerly set out to establish the campus' traditions. They chose the nickname the Pioneers because the establishment of a new private college during the post World War II era was truly a national innovation. The students also felt like pioneers as they created rules and traditions from the ground up. Wanting their school colors to represent the beautiful foliage of their campus and something of the status exemplified by the area the students took a cue from the area's designation as the "Gold Coast" and combined it with the green of the campus to come up with the colors of green and gold. The students diligently searched for a motto, which they felt would best express the aims and hopes of C.W. Post. Student Guy Corriero suggested Mens Regnum bona possident (a keen mind possesses a kingdom). It was unanimously accepted. Choosing a mascot dragged on for about a month. Everyone seemed to have his own pet animal. Suggestions finally narrowed down to a bulldog, a lion, a wolverine, a gopher, a goat and an ocelot. (An elephant or donkey were ruled out because of political connotations.) Because no one could find any college which had used the ocelot (a medium-size American wildcat), they chose it as their mascot. One of the enterprising students acquired an ocelot and on several occasions brought him on campus for special events. C.W. Post Gets its First Sports Teams
Dr. Roy Ilowit had been a high school coach and physical education teacher in Long Island when he was recruited by C.W. Post's first dean, Dr. Gordon Hoxie, to develop a recreation and physical education program at C.W. Post, for a time keeping his day job at a Long Beach high school. Soon the students were clamoring for a football team, and Dr. Ilowit recruited and coached a squad of players, mostly veterans of the Korean War. They played at the junior varsity level for two years, then took on varsity competition. Their first varsity football victory, over the Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy in 1957, was a landmark event for Post sports lovers. Later, George Kaftan, a former professional basketball player, took over as basketball coach and regularly filled the gym with shouting fans for every home game. Today, C.W. Post has 17 varsity teams and a variety
of intramural sports, ranging from football to volleyball. Students
play on 70 acres of fields, and have access to Hickox Football Field,
an out-door 400-meter running track, an equestrian center, tennis
courts, and a Recreation Center with an 8-lane swimming pool, indoor
jogging track, racquetball courts and 3 full size basketball courts. Traditions
The campus expanded to its present 307 acre size by acquiring other estates, the most famous being the homes of financial wizard E.F. Hutton and his cousin, William E. Hutton II. The mansions purchased are now used for classrooms, laboratories and art and music studios. 
Built for William E. Hutton II in 1927, Lorber Hall currently houses the School of Professional Accountancy and The Hutton House Lectures, which present lively experts from the arts and humanities. During the 1960s and 1970s major construction on campus included a new library, a humanities building and new dormitories. Today the campus maintains 47 modern buildings and three historic mansions. Major facilities include nine residence halls; two student centers: Hillwood Commons and the Arnold S. Winnick Student Center; Pratt Recreation Center equipped with an 8-lane swimming pool; the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library, which offers students access to 2.9 million volumes as part of a university-wide library system; and four main academic centers: Humanities Hall, Pell Hall, Roth Hall and Hoxie Hall. A Commitment to Community Tens of thousands of people each year have their
lives touched in some way by C.W. Post. They may be among those
who visit our accredited Hillwood Art Museum, enroll in The Hutton
House Lectures and attend our American Theater Festival. They are
children who participate in our Center for Gifted Youth. They are
users of our clinics for reading or speech and hearing, and are
members of the Poetry Center. They are job seekers using the services
of Professional Experience and Placement and the Center for Business
Research. The cultural jewel of C.W. Post is Tilles Center for the
Performing Arts, a world-class 2,200 seat concert theater that has
been compared favorably to Carnegie Hall. Tilles Center brings presentations
of jazz, rock, folk music, dance, mime, orchestral and chamber music. Academic Excellence The small liberal arts college has blossomed over the years to offer a comprehensive range of undergraduate and graduate programs in education, accountancy, business, public service, liberal arts and sciences, health professions and nursing, computer science, library and information science and visual and performing arts. Undergraduates choose from 84 bachelor's programs and 53 dual bachelor’s/master’s degree programs while graduate students choose from 63 master's degrees and 10 advanced certificates. C.W. Post enrolls 4,600 undergraduates, 3,600 graduate students and 2,800 continuing education students. It is home to 311 full-time faculty members who are researchers, scientists, scholars and artists. C.W. Post's alumni number 67,100 and include: Bunny Hoest, Lockhorn's cartoonist; Howard Lorber, CEO of Nathan's Famous, Inc.; Edward Micone, Executive Vice President, Radio City Entertainment; Joseph H. Rothenberg, Director of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Marion F. Wolf, co-founder and Corporate Vice President of Alpine Lace Brands, Inc.; George Sherman, Chairman, Campbell Soup Company; Ted David, CNBC Anchor; and Jamie Kellner, Chairman and CEO, Turner Broadcasting System; and Al Kahn, Chairman and CEO, 4Kids Entertainment. Long Island University Long Island University also has seen phenomenal growth. With six campuses in New York State and sites in a half dozen other countries, almost 30,000 students and more than 665 full-time faculty members, it is now the eighth largest private university in the country. Its many resources include 503 degree-granting programs (a growing number at the Ph.D. level), an accomplished and caring faculty, state-of-the-art facilities, a 2.9 million volume library system, varsity and intramural teams in 77 sports, WPBX-FM and WCWP-FM, Long Island's National Public Radio Network, and a proud network of more than 116,580 living alumni and alumnae. Long Island University provides access to the American dream through values-sensitive liberal arts education and broadly varied professional training that integrates classroom instruction with artistic expression and career experience. Dr. David Steinberg, a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and scholar of Southeast Asia, assumed the presidency in 1985. Passionate about the institution's mission, he declares: "Long Island University is dedicated to the discovery of new knowledge, the preparation of men and women to lead useful and successful lives the cultivation of moral and spiritual values, and the enhancement of the highest ideals of scholarship and community service."
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| Long Island University | C.W. Post Campus |