Dr. Shirley Strum Kenny was the seventh President of Queens College, serving from Fall 1985 through Spring 1994. She was the first woman president of Queens College.
“A high-ranking academic administrator at the University of Maryland will be the new president of Queens College, according to college officials.
The formal appointment of the administrator - Dr. Shirley Strum Kenny, the provost for the Division of Arts and Humanities at Maryland - as the new president, is to come Monday, they said. It is to take place at the monthly meeting of the trustees of the City University, of which Queens is a part.
Her nomination, by Dr. Joseph S. Murphy, chancellor of the university, will end a search that began in January to replace Dr. Saul B. Cohen, who resigned to become head of the Joint Distribution Committee, an international Jewish relief organization.
... Dr. Kenny, who is 50 years old, will be the fourth female president in the City University system, joining Dr. Donna E. Shalala of Hunter College in Manhattan, Dr. Flora Mancuso Edwards of Eugenia Maria de Hostos Community College in the Bronx and Dr. Ursula Schwerin of New York City Technical College in Brooklyn.
...In assuming administrative responsibilities for these various programs, Dr. Kenny will have the benefit of six years' experience as a provost at Maryland, an institution of 37,046 students and the main public university in the state. She joined the faculty at Maryland in 1971 and was chairman of the English department from 1973 to 1979.
She has written extensively on British theater of the 18th century, publishing five books, including ''The Works of George Farquhar,'' ''British Theatre and Other Arts'' and ''The Plays of Richard Steele.''
Dr. Kenny was born in Tyler, Tex., and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she got two bachelor's degrees in 1955. She received a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1957 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1964.
She has taught at the University of Texas, Gallaudet College in Washington, the University of Delaware and the Catholic University of America in Washington as well as at Maryland.
As a provost at Maryland, Dr. Kenny began bachelor's degree programs in Jewish studies and East Asian languages and literatures. She also supervised the development of undergraduate and doctoral programs in linguistics, a master of fine arts degree in theater and a doctoral program in public communications.
In addition, Dr. Kenny was involved in creating Maryland's Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies and its Center for Mediterranean Archeology.
Dr. Kenny has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Folger Shakespeare Library senior fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Officials at City University said that Dr. Murphy's decision to select Dr. Kenny from among the final three candidates for the presidency of Queens College was based not only on her administrative experience, but also her scholarly achievements.
Dr. Kenny is married to Robert W. Kenny, a history professor at George Washington University in Washington. They have four sons and a daughter, ranging in age from 14 to 25."
“‘Queens College’s loss will be Stony Brook’s gain,’ according to Elaine Maimon, dean of experimental programs at QC. Maimon is currently overseeing the college’s relatively new journalism and business minors, two of the many successful academic enterprises Shirley Strum Kenny helped launch. In her nine years at the helm, Kenny’s accomplishments have transformed and revitalized the campus; she is said to have played a major role in nearly every new project in operation. Combined with her savvy approach to fundraising and public relations, Kenny has raised the reputation of Queens College to heights it has never seen in its 57-year history.
...But if anyone kept the college running smoothly, it is she. The departing president has quite simply, done it all. She has garnered 16 times more funds than her predecessor, crucial financing considering the CUNY well is running dry.
...Kenny built an image for QC with the savvy of a Madison Avenue executive. She packaged and promoted ethnic diversity on campus like a seasoned flack, commissioning an expensive advertising campaign designed by Milton Glaser of ‘I Love New York’ fame. Like she said at the graduation ceremony: ‘Academics is showbiz.’
...The ream of innovations she brought to fruition boggles the mind. The five research centers (Louis Armstrong House and Archives, Asian/American Center, Michael Harrington Center, Center for the New American Workforce, Labor Resources Center) and seven academic programs (Business and Liberal Arts, Journalism, Women’s Studies, Labor Studies, MA in Jazz Performance, Honors in Math and Science) she superintended are all among the college’s strongest features. Her $175 million building program has given rise to the Rosenthal Library, New Science Building and New Music Building while resurrecting Klapper and Delaney Halls.
... Kenny's reign was not flawless. Many felt she left research and the graduate program undeveloped at the expense of strengthening the undergraduate curriculum. Some faculty members respected her ideas but found it difficult to advance their own; she was said to have been quite stubborn at times. Furthermore, student life is languishing and while buildings like the library gleam on the west side of the campus, some on the east end are not faring as well.
...Kenny, mother of five and a British drama scholar, hails from Tyler, Texas. Nearly every press item devoted to her dredges up some cliched reference to her home state, but they all miss the most obvious one—Shirley Kenny is a real "Steel Magnolia." At tums she is the flinty administrator, negotiating CUNY's Byzantine bureaucracy, keeping rein on GSA gadfly David Pecoraro at budget meetings; other times she is as charming and poised under pressure as, well, as a Southern belle. Even as she defects to Stony Brook, she speaks of Queens (spoken in her Texan accent, it rhymes with “trains") with an abiding love that won't leave even on a campus 50 miles away. Perhaps the most stunning reaction to her departure is the lack of fear for the future on this campus. Dean Maimon may have best explained why.
‘Because she was such a good leader, she is leaving us with a tremendous legacy,’ Maimon said of Kenny. ‘Her vision has staying power.’”
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