Ashley Schiff Park Preserve 

SCHIFF – A 26-acre nature preserve, a courtyard full of azaleas, and a pond lined with apple trees, are some of the living reminders on the Stony Brook campus of one of the university’s most popular professors, Ashley Schiff. Schiff died 21 years ago at the age of 37, after having been at Stony Brook for only five years. A look at Schiff, and the impact that his life and death had on a young university.

A hemlock tree marks the site of Ashley Schiff’s legendary stand. It was here, as the story goes, that Schiff threatened to chain himself to the tree to save it from bulldozers clearing the path for the university’s outer loop road. Some differ on the details of the episode, but the young political science professor got the result he was looking for: the road was rerouted.

Some 20 years later, the hemlock still stands a few yards away from a perilously sharp bend in the south loop road. South of the tree lie 26.7 acres of oak woods designated “forever wild” in Schiff’s honor. But Schiff did not live to see the creation of the campus nature preserve that bears his name. He died suddenly, in 1969, at the age of 37. Those who remember him say that there has been no one since, whose life – or death – has had such an impact on the campus community.

Ashley Schiff was an extraordinarily popular professor. In his five years at Stony Brook, he built a reputation as a conservationist, an outspoken advocate for sensitive campus planning, and a teacher dedicated to his students. “He was one of the most dynamic, powerful, and successful figures at the university,” says Richard Solo, director of orientation, who knew Schiff. “Ashley felt that people had an obligation to make a contribution to life on campus,” says Schiff’s political science colleague, Professor Frank Myers. “He was unforgettable.”

Schiff joined the Stony Brook faculty in 1964, at a time, says his widow, Dorothy Schiff-Shannon, when “students were looking for heroes.” He saw, in the fledgling university, the potential for creating an aesthetic and intellectual quality of life. And, as “master” of Cardozo college, he put his ideology into action.

In those days, the dormitories, or “colleges”, were presided over by faculty “masters” who organized programs and activities to enhance campus life for students living in the dorms. “The university was new and raw”, says Schiff-Shannon, “and the college program was an attempt to establish some new traditions.” The program Schiff provided at the Cardozo dorm was unlike any other in the residential colleges.

Cardozo College played host to a continuous stream of dignitaries, political figures and celebrities. Nobel laureates Linus Pauling and James D. Watson lectured there. So did Boston Celtics star Bill Russell and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg. There were senators, musicians, city planners, and even a crocodile hunter. Schiff required of his speakers only that the discussions be varied and educational.

And the students came to Cardozo in droves. “The Cardozo College program was enormously popular,” recalled Myers. “There was always something going on there. None of the others could compete with him.”

Shiff developed a large loyal student following. He led trips into New York City, and organized discussion groups and ball games. “He was very dedicated to the students,” says Schiff-Shannon, “and they knew that.”

“He had an inspirational effect on students,” says Myers, “He was good humored and unpretentious, and so thoroughly honest it was almost frightening.”

Schiff often led students on “bramble rambles”, walks through the woods just south of Cardozo college that are now named for him. He had a passion for conservation, and clashed regularly with then University President John Toll over development plans for the campus. Schiff wanted to see areas of campus preserved in their natural state, while Toll’s priority was fulfilling the state’s mandate to construct a university center for scientific research. “What Ashley wanted most was for the university to prosper,” says Muriel Weyl, Schiff’s program coordinator 21 years ago at Cardozo, “and for the campus to be beautiful.”

Schiff’s professional life was directed by his love of nature and his commitment to conservation. Although he grew up a city-child in Brooklyn, he was greatly influenced by his early experiences at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and was a self-taught naturalist. His doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, later published as the controversial book Fire and Water, examined what was then the heretical idea of controlled burning in national forests.

But, while some of Shiff’s ideas were radical, he was personally conservative. In a 1969 tribute to Schiff, student Stu Eber noted that, “Dr. Schiff was not a left-wing faculty type. He had very traditional views of the teacher-student relationship that he would not compromise.” And although his straight-laced appearance was in conflict with the tenor of the times, students were drawn to him, says Weyl, “because he was visionary, and he was committed to them.”

The summer before he died, Schiff donated 65 blooming azalea bushes and about a dozen white birch trees to the university. On a sunny day in July, he and a group of volunteer students planted the bushes and trees in a courtyard between what is now the Psychology A and B buildings.

“He wanted the campus to be more beautiful,” says Schiff-Shannon, “but he couldn’t just tell people what they should do. He felt he had to set an example.”

One group that followed Schiff’s lead was Hillel, the campus Jewish organization, which donated a Cedar of Lebanon to the university shortly after Schiff had planted the azaleas. Schiff watered the young tree daily, remembers Weyl, by running a garden hose from a faucet inside the Humanities building out the window of his corner office there.

Later that year, in September of 1969, Schiff was admitted to Mather hospital in Port Jefferson for treatment of what he thought was a persistent bronchial infection. Eight days later, on October 1, he died. Doctors later determined, that an infection of the heart lining had caused Schiff’s death. He had three young children.

The flag was flown at half-mast when news of Schiff’s death reached the Stony Brook campus. “You have to understand,” says Schiff’s colleague, Myers, “the campus was very young then; you were young and unsettled. There were no deaths on campus… no retirements. Ashley’s death was probably the first. We’d never experienced anything like that, and the loss was felt with unusual pain.”

There were memorial services, and eulogies, and there was talk of naming one of the college buildings after Schiff. The students at Cardozo college, though, decided that Schiff “was too special to have a building named after him,” says Weyl, who assumed Schiff’s Cardozo responsibilities after his death. Weyl and a group of students mounted a campaign to have a parcel of land on campus, the tract where Schiff had often walked, established as a preserve in his memory.

Two years later, in 1971, 26.7 acres along Forest Drive were designated by the university as the Ashley Schiff “forever wild” Nature Preserve. The parcel is a rolling oak woodland that extends from the south loop road to the Marine Science Research Center. It is the second largest tract of undisturbed woods left on campus (the largest is 60 acres, unprotected, north of South P-lot), and it is deliberately not maintained.

But the preserve was not the only thing to grow out of the early death of Ashley Schiff. “Ashley had motivated us all,” says Weyl, “He had this vision, and we felt strongly that we had to keep it going.” After Schiff’s death, students at Cardozo college planted crabapple trees around the edge of a pond in the center of Roth Quad, behind Cardozo college. They chose crabapple trees, says Schiff-Shanon, because “they wanted something that would bloom early in the spring, when students were still on campus, and they wanted trees that would attract birds. Ashley loved birds.”

Twenty-one years later, a dozen or so of the trees remain including one small dwarf Red Jade crabapple, a variety selected by the students because it was developed at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. For weeks now, tiny red leaflets have been emerging along the lengths of the trees’woody twigs. By the first week of May, the pond will be ringed in fragrant, blooming apple blossoms.

Across campus, slender white birches bend low over a courtyard lush with English ivy and budding azaleas. Students sit together on benches there to study or talk. It is a flourishing oasis nestled between two of the original buildings on a university campus that has grown to 103 building, and is famous for the scientific research it produces.

And on a narrow woodland path, Dorothy Schiff-Shanon is stooping to point out a tiny sprig of stripped wintergreen poking tentatively through the crumbling leaf littler of last autumn. “Ashley would have been very happy about the preserve,” she says, “but he was never content to sit back and bask in things.” The path slopes up as she approaches the opening at the South Loop Road, where cars slow to make a sharp left turn. “He would have been very proud,” she says, pausing near the thick trunk of a tall hemlock tree, “but never satisfied.”

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