Professor Olaoye Retires Immediately after 45 Several years of Excellence
Soon after 45 decades of exemplary services to Brookdale Neighborhood School, Dr. Elaine Henry Olaoye, professor of Psychology, is retiring and embarking on a new phase in her lifestyle. She was honored at the Board of Trustees’ the latest assembly for her distinguished job and for the high esteem she has gained amongst her friends, school, university administrators, and the Board of Trustees.
Dr. Olaoye was born in Montserrat. She graduated high college at 14 many years In Tortola, BVI, then moved again to Antigua, the island she calls dwelling, exactly where she took a two-yr school system and then taught Substantial Faculty pupils at 17 several years at Sunnyside University. She arrived to New York Town and graduated magma cum laude with a baccalaureate from Hunter Higher education and then concluded a master’s diploma there. A professor inspired her to do a doctorate and she was awarded a scholarship, and continued her education and learning at CUNY Graduate Centre and obtained an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in psychology.
In 1977, Brookdale hired a recruiting agency from New York City to diversify its school. Dr. Olaoye was near completion of her Ph.D. and at St. Peter’s College or university. Dr. Olaoye was their top rated advice and she drove to the job interview at Brookdale on the day of the New York City Black out. She has considering the fact that served Brookdale Local community Faculty as a complete-time psychology college member retaining the present-day rank of Comprehensive Professor and served as workforce chief and division chair in the 1980s and ’90s. Dr. Olaoye is among the longest school individuals instructing on line: She selected ITV early as an effective technique for achieving other Brookdale facilities, and it relieved her from traveling from Asbury Park, wherever she had picked out to teach, when Brookdale experienced a Middle there, to New York Metropolis at evening!
In addition to educating at Brookdale Neighborhood Faculty, she has served learners from other colleges in the region. Including St Peter’s University, Medgar Evers College or university, CUNY Lehman University, and John Jay Faculty of Criminal Justice. “I chose individuals schools in aspect because they exposed me to minority pupils, and I needed to share what ever items I experienced with them,” she said. “And, like Brookdale learning was affordably priced: these pupils have some of the cheapest university student mortgage money owed.”
Dr. Olaoye will be remembered most for her determination to excellence. Her psychology learners offered at the Hunter Faculty Annual Meeting and the Beacon Convention, which celebrates and showcases the educational achievements of remarkable pupils at group schools in the mid-Atlantic region. “It is an opportunity for our students to be part of a more substantial tutorial community,” she claimed.
In the late 1990’s she consulted with professors from the University of Pennsylvania to set up the Positive Psychology Investigate Middle on our campus. Favourable Psychology is the scientific analyze of the strengths and virtues that allow people today and communities to thrive. “We had Brookdale Positive Psychology Fellows performing research in the place,” Dr. Olaoye said.
Just one of her signature achievements was to make Brookdale the first neighborhood university to negotiate a Studies study course in Psychology for credit history transfer and program articulation with Rutgers College.
“It is a 4-credit rating training course that is extremely effectively enrolled now,” she stated. “It is a significant program for the significant, and sets a student on a path of excellence when they transfer on to a four-year higher education.”
Dr. Olaoye has received several awards and recognitions, like the Brookdale Excellent Colleague Award and the NISOD Excellence Award. While she has explained about her biggest accomplishments, “I do not imagine they are done nonetheless. They are to occur.”
She was regarded for her international point of view and acquired the 2018 International Distinction Life span Contribution Award. For lots of a long time, she taught at Brookdale’s intercontinental Ecuador campus. She has been a member of the Intercontinental Council of Psychologists (ICP), a Board member of the Manhattan Psychological Affiliation (MPA), and the Psychology Coalition at the United Nations (PCUN), which organizes the yearly UN Psychology Day.
She proven a student scholarship in her indigenous place of Antigua and Barbuda based on pupils composing about connections involving the Sciences and the Humanities. As a final result of the scholarship, just one recipient’s mom documented that her daughter is going to be a pediatrician and a novelist! In addition, Dr. Olaoye has just founded the Zimbardo-Olaoye scholarship at Brookdale for scholarly writings that concentrate on social and environmental justice and social psychology topics.
Dr. Olaoye has taken care of an ongoing collegial romantic relationship with Dr. Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford University. This marriage reworked the annual International Psychology and Poetry Competition to involve the Heroic Imagination Task, which recognizes person college or university and community customers whose perform as world’s tranquil heroes make their community a much better put.
Dr. Olaoye has several publications, the oldest remaining Passions of the Soul, Northwest Enterprises 1998 a poetry selection. When she joined Brookdale in 1977, she experienced just returned from presenting a paper to the American Psychological Association. Nonetheless, “Poetry,” she reported. “It turned a significant location from which I could do essential considering, attain insights, explore worry and a array of feelings and compose.”
Notably, chapter publications in Psychology texts consist of Prosocial Actions as a result of ‘Everyday Heroism’ The Heroic Creativeness Task, authored with Philip Zimbardo, in Behavioral Science in the World-wide Arena: International Mental, Spiritual and Social Health Editors Elaine Congress et. Information and facts Age Publishing Charlotte NC, 2022. Rising Resilience in Various Minority Clients making use of Optimistic Psychology was a chapter in A number of Minority Identities, Editors, R. Balter et al. Springer Publishing 2012. Dr. Olaoye serves on the Editorial Board of the Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books. Dr. Olaoye also provides annually at several U.S. and Caribbean conferences.
Dr. Olaoye is at this time working on an educational memoir utilizing the medium of poetry. It will be about her enjoy for Brookdale colleagues, college students, and campus, as nicely as issues about larger tutorial challenges. She shared a verse.
“My poems are spaces, places,
Contained universes
Reminiscences, like lots of lovely types of Brookdale,
Hallowed in verses,
In which you can enter
And appear around, select to sit down,
Pull down words, images, and concepts, associated to buddies and topics
That means, feelings, motivations, phone calls to action,
Flowering trees, brilliant blue spaciousness, loads of parking heaps, wooden lit sunsets,
Not just after, but several moments,
Not just in clock time, but in magical moments.”
Also integrated in her memoir is a poem titled “An Alpha and An Omega” for President Dr. David Stout. “Because I was at his commencing at Brookdale and he is at my departing,” she explained. “I have supported and celebrated his meteoric rise and I get pleasure from admiring him remaining these kinds of a wonderful president. Undertaking this tutorial memoir is bringing up numerous recollections, and it’s been good, it is been very fantastic.” She is considering the title, Recollections, and Reflections: 45 several years of Gratitude.
Dr. Olaoye also recently wrote a gorgeous tribute to Mrs. Geraldine Livingston Thompson, “First Woman of Brookdale,” which will be shown at the Smithsonian Voices & Votes exhibition at the Monmouth Museum, positioned on the Brookdale Local community Higher education campus from August 20 via October 2, 2022. And she was invited to read through her poem through the opening reception. “Reading a poem and hearing a poem becoming study are two pretty distinct encounters,” she reported. “Reading just tends to make it appear alive!”
Honored at a new retirement bash, a person of her colleagues said this about her.
“Elaine has been a close colleague and professional close friend through my 38 several years functioning at Brookdale,” stated Franklyn Rother, professor of Psychology. “She headed the research committee that interviewed me in August 1984, which led to my hire as a entire-time Psychology Instructor and Coordinator of the Human Services Program. We taught an Introductory Psychology system collectively for 17 many years. Throughout this interval, I seasoned initial-hand her dedication to a “culture d learning” for students that supported their “critical thinking” about the environment they stay in along with their position in and possible outcome on it. Her tenure at Brookdale serves as a model for pupils, staff members and colleagues to use “barriers” as prospects for private expansion, social consciousness, and sources of strength that develop and maintain organizational and social modify.
Our collegial friendship will carry on over and above her retirement (as properly as mine), as we are both of those dedicated to the expansion of awareness in Social Psychology and its apps and use in furthering Social Justice in our own society and across the globe.”
It is not possible to adequately convey the affect that Dr. Olaoye has experienced on Brookdale Neighborhood University, its staff members, its learners, and its bordering neighborhood. Nor how beloved professor Dr. Olaoye is and the degree to which her colleagues will pass up her as she enters retirement.
Image: Dr. Elaine H. Olaoye, Grand Marshal of 2022 Brookdale Neighborhood College Commencement, with President Dr. David M. Stout.
