Membership in the Association of American Universities is an invitation few public campuses receive, and in 2001 Stony Brook University received one for the first time. Shirley Strum Kenny, the president who had spent seven years building the case for that invitation, died on September 5, 2026, in McLean, Virginia. She was 92.

Kenny came to Stony Brook in 1994 as its fourth president, the first woman to hold the job, after nine years leading Queens College in New York City. She had earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 1964, writing her dissertation on the plays of Sir Richard Steele, following two bachelor's degrees in English and journalism from the University of Texas in 1955 and a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1957. She was born in Tyler, Texas, in 1934.

At Queens College, where she served as its seventh president and the first woman in that role, Kenny raised roughly $175 million for a campus building program, by the college's own account some sixteen times what her predecessor had secured. The money renovated Rosenthal Library and the Music and Science buildings and restored Klapper and Delaney Halls. She also launched seven new academic programs, including journalism and jazz performance degrees, and founded five research centers, among them the Louis Armstrong House and the Michael Harrington Center, according to Queens College, CUNY.

She carried that same appetite for building into Stony Brook. Total enrollment grew from about 17,500 to more than 23,000 students during her fifteen years as president, and the faculty grew by 8 percent, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The campus added the Charles B. Wang Center and an 8,300 seat stadium in 2002 and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in 2008, and Kenny championed Stony Brook's part in the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, an effort backed by the Carnegie Foundation, according to Stony Brook University.

The medical campus grew alongside the academic one. Stony Brook opened an Ambulatory Surgery Center in 2001, the Matt and Debra Cody Center for Autism in 2003, and new Heart, Cancer, and Pain Management Centers after 2005, while the university also opened a Manhattan outpost at 401 Park Avenue South in 2002. Incoming students grew more selective too: by 2006 the average SAT score of an entering freshman class had reached 1215, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

She also pushed Stony Brook toward the research stature that had eluded it, forging partnerships with nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory and leading a campaign that brought in nearly $360 million in gifts and pledges, the largest sum any SUNY campus had raised to that point. That drive culminated in 2001, when Stony Brook was admitted to the Association of American Universities. "She knew the power of an excellent higher education for students," SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. said after her death.

Kenny's family life ran alongside her career. She married Robert Wayne Kenny, a historian who went on to serve as dean of George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, on July 22, 1956, and their marriage lasted 68 years, until his death in April 2025. They raised five children. Their son, Rabbi Joel Strum Kenny, a scholar and educator, died of leukemia in 1999, and in 2001 the Kenny family joined other donors in endowing the Joel Strum Kenny Professorship in Cancer Research at Stony Brook. Dr. Yusuf Hannun became its first holder in 2014, saying he was "deeply honored to receive the Joel Strum Kenny Professorship in Cancer Research," according to Stony Brook Medicine.

Kenny stepped down from the Stony Brook presidency in 2009, closing fifteen years in that job and twenty four years as a university president in all. She held honorary doctorates from the University of Rochester and four Korean universities, and in 2007 she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, fifty years after her own Fulbright fellowship to the United Kingdom. As a scholar of Restoration and eighteenth century British drama, she published five books, several in editions issued by Oxford University Press.

What Kenny built is still in use. The Wang Center and the stadium anchor the Stony Brook campus she helped remake into an AAU research university, the halls and research centers she funded still serve students at Queens College, and the cancer genetics professorship named for her son continues to be held by a working scientist at the medical school she grew. Robert Kenny had died seventeen months before her. Her four surviving children, grandchildren, and a great grandson whose middle name is Joel carry the family forward, alongside the institutions Kenny spent twenty four years leading.