Hushang Bahar

First president of TC3
  1968–1982, 1984-86

The first president of TC3 has left a lasting impression on the College, not only in the form of his stewardship through the initial years in Groton and on to Dryden, but also in his personality. Mention Bahar to a TC3 employee who worked during his tenure, and the responses range from a raised eyebrow (“he might have said it a little more forceful than that” was the response once when positing Bahar’s possible reaction to a building issue), to a nostalgic chuckle.

Bahar cut an imposing physical figure, and had the fiery personality to back it up. His dedication to the survival and success of TC3 was clear. He was often seen with a broom in hand in the old Groton high school, sweeping up at the end of the day.

Bahar came from an academic family – his father was a professor of literature at the University of Tehran in Iran. Bahar studied forestry as a member of a student exchange program in India, and eventually received his bachelor’s degree in forestry while in the country. Upon moving to the United States and discovering, at the time, that “the forestry program at the University of Montana and other universities in the United States” was “very weak,” Bahar changed his direction and earned a master’s in sociology, specializing in American Indians.

The failure of doctoral pursuits in Iran (which would remain unfinished after funding dried up during a stage of the Middle Eastern Revolutions) would lead Bahar into global industry, which, by circuitous route, led him to teaching seventh grade in Florida, then into direction the Florida prison education system, on to secondary school teaching in Warwick, New York, and finally into the burgeoning community college system in New York. “Oddly enough,” he told TC3 archivist and librarian Nancy Craft in 1986, “I really, in those days, those early days, knew very little, almost nothing, about community college word. This was a new invention in those days.”

After stints Orange County Community College, Corning Community College, and Ithaca College, Bahar was asked to join a group formed by Cortland and Tompkins County and the initial board of trustees. “They started asking for applications for president. They asked me if I would want to apply. … I said, ‘Ok, what do I have to lose by applying.”

Bahar was president of TC3, officially, from 1968 to 1982, when he accepted a two-year advisory position to the developing South African nation of Lesotho, as part of a five-man delegation from the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development. He returned June 1, 1984, and retired in 1986.