The Department of Psychology was founded in September of 1967. Prior to that time, psychology courses had been offered by the Education Department at what was then called Montclair State College. The College was founded in 1908 as Montclair State Normal School, it became Montclair State Teachers College in 1927. It was authorized to offer the Masters Degree in 1932 and became Montclair State College in 1958. It became a comprehensive, multi-purpose liberal arts institution in 1966, and it became Montclair State University in 1994.

It was the shift in emphasis from an institution which was dedicated to preparing teachers for classroom instruction to an institution which was dedicated to providing a broad-based liberal arts background which motivated the separation of the Psychology Department from the Education Department. New York had led the way toward the implementation of a liberal arts curriculum in its State Colleges and New Jersey followed soon thereafter. By 1967, the original departments had changed their focus toward providing a general education within their discipline and new departments were formed in line with those in the major universities of the time.

There were 19 faculty members who founded the psychology department in 1967. These charter members who separated from Dr. Ralph Walters and the Education Department formed a closely knit group. They worked dilligently to establish a basis for future growth. Their names are: Daniel Brower, Ph. D., (Chair), Martin Brown, Ed. D., Leonard J. Buchner, Ph. D., Lois Gray Floyd, Ph. D., Victor C. Garibaldi, MA., Dorothy Bryan Garland, MA., Abraham Gelfond, Ph. D., Herbert J. Hauer, Ph. D., James A. Hense, MA., Jane Krumacher, Ed. D., Gerhard Lang, Ph. D., Orpha M. Lutz, Ph. D., James T. Mehorter, Ed. D., Maynard L. Rich, MS., Jerome M. Seidman, Ph. D., John Seymour, Ph. D., Abbie F. Schapiro, Ed. D., Ira R. Sugarman, MS., and Peter F. Worms, Ed. D.,.)

The department was originally housed in a rickety and temporary wooden building called Annex E. Three senior professors had their own private offices. All of the other faculty members shared a large room which was referred-to as the 'bull-pen.' Professor Dan Brower was the first chairman of the psychology department and he remained its chair until he suffered a debilitating heart attack in 1972.

The Psychology Department offered courses leading to a major and BA in Psychology and then gradually added minors, concentrations, and graduate programs. As the professors developed their professional careers they brought their knowledge and enthusiasms into the classroom and developed a splendid array of courses which paved the way for the move toward becoming an University. The goal of the department has always been to provide the best possible education to our undergraduate and graduate students. The core curriculum of introductory and scientific methods courses was gradually supplemented by a wide variety of specialized courses designed to reflect the major trends and changing focus of the field of psychology.

The Psychology Department also provided staff for 'Psychological Services' which was founded by Dr. Leonard Buchner who soon became its director. Psychological Services was originally a one-person operation, housed part-time in the Russ Hall medical office. It provided brief, confidential therapeutic sessions to faculty and students. It soon expanded to include Drs. Martin Brown, Ira Sugarman, Dan Williams, Peter Worms, a per-diem psychiatrist, and Mrs Viola Robe the full-time secretary. After several moves it settled in Annex 4, a "temporary" wooden buliding designed during World War II as living quarters for veterans returning to college on the G.I.Bill. Supported enthusiastically by Dean Blanton and Dr. Alan Moorhead, Psychological Services became an important contributor to the ever-growing reputation of the college. When Dr. Buchner resigned to return to teaching psychology, Dr. Susan Herman became the director.

Brenda Balady was the Psychology Department Secretary until the early 1990's. Marjorie Ott started as the secretary for the School Psychology Program and later became the additional secretary for the entire Department of Psychology until her retirement in the mid 1980's.

In 1970, The Psychology department moved into a very large open room in College Hall which was the central building on campus. Only the senior professors were given desks near a window and only Dr. Brower, the chairman, had his own office.

In 1971, the Psychology Department moved into a former dormitory called Russ Hall. Offices were distributed through the three upper floors and the various storage and utility rooms in the basement were used as makeshift laboratory rooms. Due to space limitations, several professors were forced to use basement rooms as their offices and to share offices with other professors.

Dr. Margarita Garcia designed the renovations of a section of the basement of Russ Hall to serve as the very first laboratory of physiological psychology. She directed the purchase of equipment for the preparation and implantation of electrodes, for histological analysis of brain tissue, and for stimulation and recording of electrical activity in the brains of rats. She also directed the purchase of a Beckman Polygraph for recording of electrophysiological responses in humans. Undergraduate courses in physiological psychology were offered with a lab for many years. Dr. Garcia obtained a permit to keep animals in the basement and laboratory courses teaching the methodology of electrical brain implants and operant conditioning were taught using a large colony of rats as subjects. Several Masters Theses resulted from this research.

A specially designed blower and ductwork system removed the odors of the rats but it could not be used in the winter since it brought frigid air in from outside to replace the air it pumped out. After particularly heavy rainstorms, the basement flooded to a depth of a few inches and it took several days to dry it out.

The basement also housed the so-called ''calculator room'' with its 5 electro-mechanical calculators. Each machine was capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing using electric motor driven gears. Students and faculty did all of their statistical calculations including t-tests and analyses of variance on these calculators. In 1976, An IBM electric keypunch machine was installed and used for punching data holes into IBM cards which were then hand-carried to the computer center in College Hall for processing. A graduate assistant was assigned to the calculator room to help students and faculty use the machines. By 1976, an all-electronic calculator was added and a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer with 4K of memory arrived in 1982. It was followed by Digital Equipment Corp. Rainbow computers and IBM computers by 1988.

In 1972, Prof. Dan Brower's heart attack initiated a search for a replacement chairman. Dr. Brower was awarded the first sabbatical leave ever granted by Montclair State to aid with his recovery and applicants for his position were carefully screened. The most highly qualified applicant was found to have falsified his credentials during the exhaustive process of screening and selecting a chairman. Professor Hank Hauer was finally appointed acting chairman and Professor John Seymour was then elected chairman of the department. He was succeeded by Dr. Roland Siiter, Dr. Saundra Collins, Dr. Dave Townsend, Dr. Mark Koppel, and Dr. Saundra Collins through the year 2000.

The student enrollment in psychology department courses increased rapidly and from the 1970's through 2000, the department has had the second largest number of undergraduate majors in the university. The number of majors has remained relatively constant within 10% of 850 during that time. However, the number of full-time faculty members has decreased from 42 in the 1970's to a low of 28 in the late 1990's. Beginning in 2000, the number of full-time faculty was being increased. Most of the faculty receive FSIP (Faculty Scholarship Incentive Program) reseased-time grants each semester. This generally reduces their teaching load to allow them to devote more time to their research.

Over the years, the original undergraduate major leading to a BA in Psychology was expanded to include a concentration in Community Psychology. A Community Psychology and a General Psychology minor were also added to the department's offerings. The Psychology department also participated in an interdisciplinary Justice Studies Major with a Child Advocacy minor and an interdisciplinary Cognitive Psychology Major.

In 1981 the original graduate Master of Arts degree in Psychology was expanded to include a Concentration in Industrial / Organizational Psychology. As this and other graduate programs were added, graduate student enrollment also grew and varied over the years from 150 to 300.

In 1970, a Master of Arts degree in Educational Psychology was created. It had sub-specializations in Human Sexuality and an Interrelated Graduate Program in Special Education and special Pupil Services: Teacher of the Emotionally and Socially Disturbed. A concentration in Clinical Psychology for Spanish-English Bilinguals was added in 1992. A concentration in Child / Adolescent Clinical Psychology was added in 1998.

In 1970, a School Psychology Certification Program was created by Professor Herbert Hauer with the assistance of Dr. Abbie Salny. It required a minimum of 63 hours of coursework as well as supervised school, clinical, and community training. During the years that Abby Salny (nee Shapiro) was at the helm of the School Psychology program, Montclair State graduated dozens of students who went on to become the psychologists of school systems throughout all the counties of the state of New Jersey as well as out of state. Dr. Salny was particularly active in recruiting Hispanic students, and Montclair graduated an impressive number of Hispanic School Psychologists.

In 1996, a large new building was completed and the psychology department moved into the new Dickson Hall. Every full-time faculty member was given a nicely furnished office with a window and a state-of-the-art computer system consisting of a Dell Pentium 90MHz computer with 16M memory, a 360M hard disk and a CD rom drive running the Windows 3.1 operating system. The individual faculty computers were upgraded over the ensuing years to keep up with the changes in technology.

Well before the move into the new building, the psychology faculty all signed a petition to the administration requesting that the amount of laboratory space in the new building equal the amount of space vacated in Russ Hall.

Dr. Perera measured the laboratory space in Russ Hall and, after being given an equal amount of space in the new building, he designed the new laboratory space to include all of the laboratory facilities needed for student and faculty research and instruction.

An experimental psychology laboratory was designed with 24 individual student research cubicles and an attached multipurpose experiment control and equipment storage room.

A large, multi-purpose physiological psychology laboratory with its own attached animal maintenance room was optimized for performing research on animals. When not used for for this purpose, it could also be used as a general-purpose research room and classroom.

Twelve special faculty/student research rooms were also built. Three of these rooms included IAC certified soundproof rooms for auditory research and the others included one-way mirrors for supervising students and allowing students to observe experiments. A conference/seminar room was also included.

In 2000 there was a critical need for additional faculty office space. The new dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences transferred 12 of the 24 student research cubicles in the experimental psychology laboratory to other departments. He promised to return this space to the psychology department after the completion of a major addition to Dickson Hall which was scheduled to be completed by 2002.

Go to the Montclair State University Psychology Department Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation: