Robert L. Payton
August 23, 1926 - May 19, 2011
Served as Hofstra’s President from 1973-1976
“Hofstra students, with rare exceptions, have always been students strongly motivated by economic requirements. Most of our students are here to ‘better’ themselves, and they have always looked to their education at Hofstra as a means to full access to the economic and social possibilities of society….Alongside the economic, we have insisted on attention to the cultural, even the spiritual; alongside the technical skills they gain, we have always sought to provide our students with some mastery of the arts and sciences.”
– R.L. Payton
Remarks at Faculty Convocation, September 2, 1975
Click to Play Audio from Oral History Interview
conducted on May 19, 1978
Transcript of Audio
In 1973, I was at that time president of C.W. Post College. And along about March of that year I announced my resignation. I had gotten to know James Harper Marshall as a fellow president in the area. Jim and I had been acquainted, become acquainted through the work of the Long Island Consortium of colleges and it became known that I was available to do something else. I had gone on the assumption that the three principal private colleges, universities, in the area – C.W. Post, Hofstra, and Adelphi – were substantially similar institutions. I think in overall depth of quality of faculty that Hofstra struck me as a substantially stronger institution and that seemed to me to suggest an opportunity that I hadn’t been aware of, namely the emergence of Hofstra as a serious university with standards of quality that would be recognized and accepted beyond the area. I made two contributions – one intentional and one unintentional (laughing). Both of them, I think, have resulted in quite positive benefits to the institution. The first one, and it was reflected in raising the standards, was to make the assertion that Hofstra University should be the best place you can go to school if you go to school on Long Island. And I think now, at the undergraduate level, that’s probably true. We changed a whole set of other things. We changed the way we gave financial aid. It was all skewed toward improving the quality of the undergraduate population. The other thing was the unanticipated collapse of income from graduate education. We didn’t anticipate that and we had to get whatever it was out the budget during the course of that academic year and the only way we could do that was to terminate personnel. I know that a lot of people were terminated. I don’t know what the final number was but I do know that if you look at the actual financial result that the deficit was very close to the figure that we gave the board that we said we’d meet. And in the subsequent year there was a sufficient surplus to permit the administration and the board to distribute some of the surplus in salary increases or bonuses. I generally have a very positive feeling about the institution. My feeling about the place and the people in it tends to be positive. I admire Hofstra’s faculty. There is a quality of excitement about being in a good university.