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
Reprinted here with permission from the
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