New Paltz has created a new Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO) on the New Paltz campus, which will be directed by Gerald Benjamin, Associate VP for Regional Engagement. The center will serve as the principal locus of the college’s efforts to raise its level of engagement within communities, government and businesses across the Hudson Valley.

Providing knowledge and expertise to help state and local government best serve the citizenry and fostering opportunities for collaboration with surrounding communities and organizations have long been core purposes of superior public universities in the United States. In this tradition, the Center will marshal existing intellectual resources from across the academic units of SUNY New Paltz and focus these in service to the region and New York state.

“Although for many years New Paltz has supplied faculty expertise and talented graduates across the Hudson Valley,” said College President Steven Poskanzer, “this new center will let us raise the visibility and impact of such intellectual engagement to a whole new level. When we decided to create the Center, one name – and one name only – leapt to mind as the perfect leader. Over the last three decades, Gerald Benjamin has compiled an unmatched record as a profoundly influential scholar and commentator of New York government, as a committed public servant and community leader, and as a prominent political ambassador of the college.”

Poskanzer noted as well that the new center will help advance the institution’s effort to “become a cultural and intellectual hub of the mid-Hudson Region,” a top college goal articulated in his 2005 State of the College address.

According to Benjamin, the center’s portfolio will include, but will not be limited to:

• conducting and publicizing research on regional topics;
• encouraging faculty to build regionally-based service activity into their scholarship and teaching;
• creation/direction of one or more institutes focused on specific topics of regional interest;
• leading the college’s academic outreach to local governments, non-profits and for-profit organizations; and creating programs to train newly-elected regional officials.

Benjamin was named by the SUNY trustees in 2002 as Distinguished Professor of the University in Political Science. He was an elected member of the Ulster County Legislature from 1981 to 1993 and during that time served as both majority leader and chairman. Benjamin has been involved in a number of major efforts to reform state and local
government New York State. He chaired the commission that proposed the first charter for Ulster County, N.Y., adopted by popular vote in November 2006. Benjamin was appointed to New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer’s Commission on Local Government Efficiency in 2007.

The center will also house the college’s existing Regional Education programs under the new leadership of dean Helise Winters.

Winters, who has been associate dean of Continuing and Professional Education and director of Extension and Distance Learning for nine years, said that for many years New Paltz has been performing community outreach to serve the region through its graduate programs and advising, summer session, alliances with teacher centers, extension and distance learning, doctoral program and the Language Immersion Institute.

For more information, call (845) 257-2901 or visit www.newpaltz.edu/crreo.