Associate Professor Jim Robinson Reflects on 50 Years at Empire State University

(SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – June 12, 2025) Fifty years have come and gone, but Jim Robinson still remembers his first day at Empire State University. It was 1975, and Robinson—then a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at New York University—joined the faculty as a part-time instructor. 

“I was interviewed in a room full of about 30 to 40 people who were having a bag lunch. People sort of asked me questions at random while they ate their sandwiches,” he recalls. “The social work people wanted to know how I would talk to a student, and the art people wanted to know if I went to museums. The question really was, ‘Will you fit?’” 

Luckily for Robinson, currently an associate professor based on Long Island, it’s safe to say the answer was “yes.” Although his pre-Empire resume includes formative stints as a staff assistant for Congress and a labor relations assistant for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the longtime educator—who has two children and a granddaughter—views teaching as his true calling.  

“It fit me because it allowed me to work closely with people, and that was something that I valued,” he says of his first position at SUNY Empire.  

Robinson’s addition to the faculty made sense in other ways, too: Prior to his appointment, “I had gone through three different programs: a bachelor’s degree in literature, a master’s in history, and a Ph.D. in political science. And Empire was looking for generalists and people who worked interdisciplinary,” he explains. “It turned out that I have used at Empire every scrap of what I had ever learned in any program, and it has paid off in strange ways.” 

Robinson—an Oregon native who, as a child, moved around the country with his family before settling in New York—has held numerous positions at the university over the years. In addition to teaching, he has performed a wide variety of administrative roles including serving as the program director for the international Cyprus/Athens Unit in the early 1990s and chairing the graduate program in policy studies, which he helped develop. Through it all, though, his dedication to empowering his students has remained the same.  

“I’m interested in [students] developing the skill to learn for themselves, and that was right there from the very beginning for me,” Robinson says, noting that he encourages those who take his classes to think of him as a coach rather than a judge. “We were told the core of our mission was that people should be independent learners, and that just struck a chord with me. That’s probably the one thing that stayed with me throughout.” 

After half a century on the job, Robinson says other parts of the university’s stance on education have continued to resonate with him, too—namely its focus on “the broadening of peoples’ perspectives … and a commitment to get people to the point where they could participate publicly.” 

“That is civic education in the best sense,” he says.