Barbara Selvin, Neighbor

I'm an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University and a former Newsday reporter. I began teaching at Stony Brook in 2000, one course per semester, when the journalism program was an all-adjunct minor housed in the English Department. When Howard Schneider left the editorship of Newsday in 2005 after refusing yet another mandate for newsroom cuts from Tribune Co., the paper's owner at the time, he came to SBU to explore expanding the journalism program. We became a school in the summer of 2006, and six months later I became the first full-time faculty hire. Sometimes, one lands in the right place at the right time.

I have been part of the Stony Brook University/Three Village community for 44 years, since my father, the late Professor Hanan Selvin, was recruited to chair and to build the sociology department. My mother, Rhoda Selvin, helped build the university’s undergraduate program as an administrator in the Provost’s Office for many years. (She retired in 1995 and continued to live in Stony Brook until May 2011, when she moved to where I live now, in Port Washington, N.Y.) I grew up with the campus, a little young for the legendary Airplane and Dead concerts but there for some excellent Hot Tuna shows. I attended North Country Elementary School, Gelinas Junior High and Ward Melville High School. I played with my neighborhood friends in the late, lamented Forsythe Field on top of Hawkins Hill, hung out at the Setauket Millpond and swam at West Meadow and Sand Street beaches.

I discovered journalism just before college ended when Leah Dunaief let me try my hand at writing for what was then The Village Times. After graduating, I worked for three years at Suffolk Life, a now-defunct, weekly free newspaper on the East End that taught me a lot but was completely lacking in journalistic cache. I got my status card punched at Columbia J-school, class of 1983, then freelanced, worked at The (Stamford, Conn.) Advocate for less than a year and was swept up in Times Mirror Corp.'s big investment in New York Newsday. Those seven years on the New York business desk seem like a lost paradise now.

I spent my last year at Newsday on the health and science desk. I had pioneered Newsday's part-time work schedule in for reporters and editors in 1988--my legacy, though in the end I had to leave when my third child was born in 1993. I stayed home for five years, then began teaching college journalism and discovered a second career as fulfilling as the first. That brings us up to my arrival at -- my return to -- Stony Brook.

Funny how life sometimes goes full circle.

You can reach me at barbara.selvin@stonybrook.edu.