Shirley Strum Kenny

Shirley Strum Kenny (August 28, 1934, to September 3, 2026) was an American English scholar and university president who led Queens College (CUNY) and then Stony Brook University through transformative years as a research power that also cared about undergraduates, beauty, and the arts. She was the seventh president of Queens College (1985-1994), the first woman in that role, and the fourth president of Stony Brook (1994-2009), the first woman and first humanist to hold that office. Stony Brook University News reported that she died on September 3, 2026, in McLean, Virginia, aged 92. Cause of death was not made public in sources reviewed. Wikipedia, citing a SUNY statement, lists September 5, 2026; this profile follows the SBU memorial for date and place.

Kenny was born in Tyler, Texas, into a Jewish Texas family (parents Marcus and Florence Golenternek Strum; older brother Stanley Strum of Waco, d. 2015). She earned two bachelor's degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in 1955, one in English and one in journalism. (Wikipedia incorrectly lists University of Texas at Dallas for the BA; Fulbright Association materials, the Queens College presidential guide, the January 2025 TBR interview, and the 2026 SBU memorial all place the undergraduate work at UT Austin.) She and Robert Wayne Kenny met while working on The Daily Texan. They married in 1956 and were together for 68 years until Robert's death in 2025. She took an M.A. at the University of Minnesota (1957), was a Fulbright fellow to the United Kingdom in 1957, and completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1964 with a thesis editing Sir Richard Steele's The Funeral and The Tender Husband. An honorary Ph.D. in Philosophy followed from Chonnam National University in 1996. She taught at the University of Texas, Gallaudet, the Catholic University of America, the University of Delaware, and the University of Maryland, where she chaired English and later served as Provost of the College of Arts and Humanities.

At Queens College she established programs that reshaped campus identity: Business and Liberal Arts, Journalism, an Asian American Center, the Louis Armstrong House and Archives Project, the Michael Harrington Center, and the Center for the New American Workforce. When she left for Stony Brook in 1994 she told her mother in Tyler she was taking "a much more important job" and "burst into tears," because Queens "had a heart" while Stony Brook was a place where "science ruled" and "faculty were more important than students" (TBR, Jan 2025). Her answer was to change both culture and landscape. With architect John Belle (Beyer Blinder Belle) and landscape designer Lynden B. Miller she remade the asphalt center into the Academic Mall, with fountains and the man-made stream known as The Brook. "The first important thing I did was to change [Stony Brook] from the ugliest campus in America to the beautiful campus it is now," she later said. She expanded the student center, moved athletics toward Division I, and insisted that undergraduates mattered as much as research stars.

Institutional milestones stacked through her fifteen-year Stony Brook presidency. Stony Brook joined the Association of American Universities in 2001 and gained SUNY flagship recognition and top-worldwide ranking citations. In 1998 she helped form Brookhaven Science Associates with Battelle to manage Brookhaven National Laboratory and chaired the BSA board. The same year she chaired the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University; its Carnegie-funded report Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities pushed inquiry-based undergraduate research nationwide. Landmark openings in 2002 included the Charles B. Wang Center and Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium. Partnerships with Richard Leakey helped seed the Turkana Basin Institute (2005); work with Alan Alda from 2006 built what became the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. East Campus hospital modernization and alliances with community hospitals (including Southampton) widened the medical network. By her final 2009 commencement she had conferred 70,562 degrees (about 46 percent of all degrees since the university opened), including 5,421 that day. In 2007 she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal with Craig Barrett and John Hope Franklin.

After Stony Brook she served as interim president of Augusta State University (July 1 to December 31, 2012) until the post disappeared in a Georgia university merger. She remained a Restoration and eighteenth-century drama scholar and stayed connected to Long Island through family, including daughter Sarah Kenny Azzara, a lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook. She was preceded in death by Robert and by son Joel Strum Kenny (leukemia, 1999). She is survived by sons David (and Anne), Daniel, and Jonathan; daughter Sarah; daughter-in-law Deborah Kenny; grandchildren Avraham, Ava, Rachel, and Casper; and great-grandson Tyler Joel Kenny. Services were set for September 9, 2026, at 1:30 p.m. at Temple Rodef Shalom, Falls Church, Virginia. The Shirley Strum Kenny Student Arts Festival still fills the Academic Mall each spring in her name.