Dr. Ed Bonahue is the President of Suffolk County Community College, the largest community college in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. SUNY Suffolk is a comprehensive publicly-supported, two-year, open enrollment institution, with campuses in Selden, Riverhead and Brentwood, and downtown centers in Sayville and Riverhead. The college has a current enrollment of more than 23,000 credit students, 7,000 continuing education students, and more than 140,000 alumni.
Dr. Bonahue is a seasoned higher education executive with more than 20 years of experience in community college education, including service as a tenured faculty member and senior executive. Prior to joining the college on June 28, 2021, Dr. Bonahue served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida. In that role, he provided leadership for planning, management, and assessment of all credit and non-credit instructional programming, and economic and workforce development initiatives. He successfully implemented nine new baccalaureate programs and multiple associate of science degree and certificate programs, as well as two deferred-admission partnerships with the University of Florida. In addition, he served as the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs; Chair, Department of Humanities and Foreign Languages; Co-chair, International Education Initiative, and he earned tenure as a professor of Humanities and Theatre.
In addition to his administrative experience, Dr. Bonahue’s scholarly research on Renaissance literature has appeared in Studies in Philology, Renaissance Papers, Studies in English Literature, and elsewhere, and his work on Stephen Sondheim has been reprinted and cited repeatedly since its first publication. His study on best practices in international education has been published by NASPA, and he has served as Managing Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2009, Dr. Bonahue was a Fulbright Scholar with the U.S. International Administrators Program in Germany, and in 2016-2017, he was an Aspen Institute College Excellence Program Presidential Fellow. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the HIA-LI (Hauppauge Industrial Association - Long Island).
Dr. Bonahue earned the Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English literature at the University of North Carolina, and his B.A. in English literature from Wake Forest University. He is also a proud graduate of Ward Melville High School and the Three Village School District.
