By GREGORY ZELLER //
Hofstra University’s new president has been ceremonially inaugurated – and with the pomp and circumstance finished, she’s getting right back to business.
Susan Poser actually took the reins of Long Island’s largest private university on Aug. 1, succeeding longtime President (now President Emeritus) Stuart Rabinowitz. Her Oct. 1 inauguration ceremony at Hempstead’s David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex was a bit of theater, a chance for the university and a host of special guests from across academia to honor the first woman to serve as Hofstra president.
It also marked the public launch of Poser’s ambitious presidential agenda, including a yearlong effort designed to solicit input from the campus community – faculty, students, the Board of Trustees and everyone else – on where Hofstra goes from here.
The idea is to “identify the priorities to which we will direct our energy and our resources,” the president said in her inaugural address, and to answer questions about Hofstra’s post-pandemic identity and ambitions.
“(This) initiative … will serve as the foundation for the next decade,” Poser said.
More than 1,000 audience members, representing the Hofstra and Long Island communities and the leaders of colleges and universities from across New York and the nation, were on hand to hear her say it.
Harvey Perlman: Poser fan.
The Oct. 1 ceremony featured student performances and Poser-praising laudatory speeches by University of Iowa President Barbara Wilson, former University of Nebraska Chancellor Harvey Perlman and Daniel Dawes, director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Atlanta-based Morehouse School of Medicine.
Perlman, also the former dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law, said Hofstra had “chosen wisely” in the selection of its new president, adding Poser “will be aggressive in pursuing your collective ambitions, will seize on opportunities that present themselves … (and) will also push each of you to contribute your best to this enterprise.”
Poser is already pushing. On Oct. 1, the freshly minted head honcho cited Indian novelist Arundhati Roy – who in a 2020 Financial Times article described pandemics as “portals” that force humanity “to break with the past” and imagine a new world – and referenced pending conversations with Hofstra faculty, administrators and student leaders focused on “decid[ing] what post-pandemic world we want to imagine.”
“If the pandemic is a portal, how will Hofstra walk through it?” Poser asked. “What will we take, and what will we leave behind?
“What world are we ready to fight for?” she added. “What kind of university and community do we want to imagine on the other side?”
The university – founded in 1935 by lumber magnate William Hofstra as an extension of New York University, known then as Nassau College-Hofstra Memorial of New York University at Hempstead – will leverage several existing strengths in pursuit of those answers.
Warm welcome: Hofstra Board of Trustees Chairman Donald Schaeffer (at podium) and other dignitaries honor the new president Oct. 1.
Poser, who earned a law degree and a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California, Berkeley, noted Hofstra’s unique standing as a midsized university with a liberal arts tradition and a wide range of professional programs, including medicine, law and engineering.
Also working in the university’s favor is diversity – 46 percent of incoming 2021-2022 students self-identify as people of color, according to Hofstra – and a strong foundation of faculty research, bolstered by deep collaborations with Northwell Health.
These considerable resources will help Hofstra throughout its yearlong effort to determine “what do our students need to learn, and how should they learn it,” according to Poser, who most recently served as vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
“We have the ability to be nimble and to take the strategic risks that we must take,” the president said. “We have the alumni, community and friends to guide and support us.
“If we have the commitment, the discipline and the energy,” Poser added, “we will prosper as never before.”
