Unlocking history: Inside the Empire State University archives
(SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – JULY 3, 2024) Hidden in a seemingly inconspicuous storage closet within Empire State University’s building on Union Avenue in Saratoga Springs is the history of the university’s founding and the documents that outline its mission.
Dr. Anastasia Pratt, an associate professor, is working to make that information public and archive it through New York Heritage. It will be displayed on their digital collections website with the help of a grant from the Capital District Library Council.
Pratt and her team will be focused on the correspondence between Ernest Boyer and Arthur Chickering, which details the founding ideals of Empire State University and will allow for broader preservation, research, and exposure relating to our history, adult education, and higher education.
“It has hundreds of documents, photographs, and artifacts that are really influential and important,” Pratt said. “They tell a story about how adult education and distance education came to existence, but also how they influenced the rest of the world of education beginning in the 1970s.”
By archiving the university’s founding, Empire State University’s mission will be more widely available and, according to Pratt, help build the future of higher education.
“They have an important place in the history of higher education, but they also have an important place in the history of New York,” Pratt said. “People are going to stumble across our archives and interact with us in a new and engaging way.”
The project is a labor of love, Pratt explained. The team will go through each document individually, weed out duplicate copies, and digitally scan each document to archive it.
“It’s painstaking work,” Pratt said. “One piece of paper at a time with full preparation that you’re going to get dirty by the end of it.”
For Bradley Towle, a graduate student in the public history program, an internship has turned into an opportunity to explore the mission of the institution he chose to further his education and pursue a deeper interest in the 1970s.
“It’s the end of this high-minded era of the 1960s and this utopian dream where some of the stiff stuff is still around,” Towle said. “His idea was that somebody’s location should not determine whether they could attend SUNY Empire 50 years later, that’s a different statement than it was in 1971, so there’s a real vision to the foundation of it.”
Shannon Pritting, director of library services, said publicizing the ideas of Empire State University’s founders will help further innovation within the university while looking back to those original ideals.
“It seems like we are constantly referring back to the original vision,” Pritting said. “This is a good connection of all of those things, like how SUNY Empire is an institution evolving and reinforcing its ideals as we raise our public profile.”
The project will continue throughout the summer and into the fall.