Many of CSI's programs honor Willowbrook legacy

Staten Island Advance
Wednesday, January 7, 2004

As an institution of public higher education located on the grounds of the former Willowbrook State School, the College of Staten Island honors the memory of Willowbrook's residents in ways that reflect the College's academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge and to prepare well-trained and caring professionals.

The Willowbrook Collection. In 2001, the Archives & Special Collections Department of the CSI Library created The Willowbrook Collection on the history of the institution, its closing, its legacy, and the people and organizations involved. The collection contains thousands of documents and photos from Willowbrook, as well as news clippings spanning the 1940s to 2000. The collection is open to the public and is housed on the second floor of the Library.

Willowbrook Memorial Lectures. Since 2002 CSI has hosted several public lectures on Willowbrook and related topics and plans to hold another program in 2004. Themes of past programs have been, Advocacy and Self-Advocacy, and The Case Continues: The Status of the Willowbrook Consent Decree. In May of 2002, CSI also hosted a full-day program on the 25th anniversary of the signing of the consent decree that ultimately led to the closing of the school. Participants included family members of the residents, an independent evaluator for the Willowbrook class and an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties union.

Willowbrook Memorial Plaque. A memorial plaque on building 3S, one of the original buildings (number 19) remaining from the Willowbrook State School, reads: To Honor Those Who Struggled Here on the Grounds of the Willowbrook Institution We Preserve This Former Building Number in Their Respectful Remembrance.

Research, Professional Preparation, and Disabilities Services. Our longstanding research partnership with the Institute for Basic Research produces important studies on the neuroscientific causes of developmental disabilities. Our programs in special education, physical therapy, and social work prepare professionals to work with children and adults with disabilities. The college further serves its own students with disabilities through the Office of Disability Services.

---Lin Wu, Willowbrook
The writer is special assistant to President Marlene Springer, College of Staten Island.

For most of us, the College of Staten Island represents an equal opportunity education for anyone who seeks it, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or race. For many, it acts as a safety net, catching those that have fallen through the cracks of the public education system.

For others, it offers an escape from some of the limitations associated with living outside the United States, such as political oppression, poverty, and discrimination.

For others, its flexibility offers encouragement to those seeking career advancement. Most important, it provides anyone who enters, a chance to grow intellectually, socially, and emotionally.

Without previous knowledge, one would never imagine that its campus, formerly known as Willowbrook, was once home to almost 6,000 mentally disabled, physically disabled and orphaned children.

The buildings now dedicated to such studies as sociology, education, and nursing, only 30 years ago served as torture chambers to children that were physically and emotionally abused, neglected, and for the sake of medical research, infected with hepatitis, and used as human guinea pigs. Children lay on the floor of what are now classrooms naked and smeared with their own feces.

The buildings themselves reflect nothing of their past; peeling paint, filth, broken light bulbs, and the smell of death are no longer. Tennis courts, baseball fields, and parking lots have replaced buildings that were not worth repair, and information regarding the compound's past are kept under lock and key in the new library. In fact, there are no reminders of what was once known as Willowbrook.

There are no memorial walls, gardens, footprints or headstones to remember those that suffered not at the hands of terrorists but at the hands of our own government.

This is no longer acceptable, Marlene Springer. Your students and faculty challenge you to make sure Willowbrook [will] be remembered. After all, children died here.

---Jessica Long, St. George