Welcome – Admissions Open House Luncheon
Saturday, April 10, 2004 – Daniel F. Sullivan
Hello and Welcome! I’m Dan Sullivan, St. Lawrence Class of
1965 and President of the University. It’s great to be here
with you today. It’s something made even more meaningful to
me because I sat where you sit in 1961, trying to decide among St.
Lawrence, Cornell, Rochester, Oberlin and Colby. I chose St. Lawrence,
and I’ve never looked back. It was one of the most important
decisions of my life, and a decision I have never regretted even
for a moment. I hope you feel the same way many years from now about
the college decision you are about to make. I’m glad you’ve
decided to spend this day with us.
What I want to do in my remarks today is tell you some things about
St. Lawrence faculty and students, about the kind of education we
seek to provide here, and about what I believe we know to be true
from a great deal of research about quality in liberal arts education.
It comes from the heart, and it is rooted in nearly 40 years of experience
in higher education after completing my own undergraduate degree.
Our primary task at St. Lawrence, clearly articulated
in our mission statement, is “to provide an inspiring and demanding
undergraduate education in the liberal arts to students selected
for their seriousness of purpose and intellectual promise.” Right
away that tells you several critically important things you need
to know to understand us:
- We are committed to “inspiring” students, not just
exposing them to new fields and ideas.
- We will be “demanding,” because we know that if you
have high expectations of students they will achieve great things.
- We are in the business of “undergraduate” education,
so our whole focus is on undergraduate students, not graduate students
or research.
- The education we provide is “in the liberal arts.” It
is not professional education, or technical education, or vocational
education—it is education for a life, education that inspires
students to be lifelong learners, education that prepares students
to make a difference in a wide array of careers, education that
encourages students to find meaning in what they do, and to better
understand the great issues and questions that are at the center
of the quest to be a learned, educated person. Only 3% of American
colleges and universities have education in the liberal arts as
their primary mission—if you come to St. Lawrence you will
become part of a very special tradition.
- We are selective. We seek students who are serious of purpose
because we believe that the rich array of opportunities for learning
and growth St. Lawrence provides should be reserved for those students
who are prepared and willing to dive in deeply to take advantage
of them. A great education can’t just be “provided” to
students. Students must engage—they must be active learners.
We believe you are such students.
- We seek and enroll large numbers of serious students with very
high intellectual achievement and promise; we also rejoice in teaching
serious students of high intellectual promise who will be transformed
by the process—who will achieve far more than they and others
expect.
Our mission statement is short—what I read to you is the whole
thing—but the words have been selected carefully, and they
convey much about who we are.
Increasingly over the past fifteen years or so, all
of us as a society, and we in higher education especially, have been
seeking better and better ways to assess the outcomes for students
that result from our work. One of the things we have learned, from
study after study, is that students attending selective residential
liberal arts colleges, of all the different kinds of American colleges
and universities, consistently achieve the largest and most consistent
educational gains across a whole spectrum of educational goals. It
is institutions like St. Lawrence that add the most value.
For example, Alexander Astin, perhaps the foremost
researcher in America for over three decades on these questions,
said recently in a comprehensive review essay:
. . . . . residential liberal arts colleges in general, and highly
selective residential liberal arts colleges in particular, produce
a pattern of consistently positive student outcomes not found in
any other type of American higher-education institution. .
. . . . .[they exemplify] much of what has come to be known as best
educational practice in undergraduate education. “Best,” in
this context, refers to practices shown to have a favorable impact
on student learning and development.”
These best practices include:
- Frequent student-faculty interaction
- Frequent student-student interaction
- Generous expenditures on student services
- A strong faculty emphasis on diversity
- Frequent [enrollment by students in] interdisciplinary and humanities
courses . .
- Frequent use of courses that emphasize writing
- Frequent use of narrative evaluations
- Infrequent use of multiple-choice exams
- Frequent involvement of students in independent research
- Frequent involvement of students in faculty research
These best practices are, of course, at the very center of our nationally-known
first-year program. We start students off this way and then keep
it going.
I actually suspect that you know all of this already
because you are considering St. Lawrence, and that makes me very
pleased.
But there is more. Astin went on to say that, among
selective liberal arts colleges, the most effective colleges were
those that were both very demanding academically and had
a strong student orientation—that is, they focused not just
on being challenging academically but also on student development
in a much broader set of ways: they care deeply about students as
whole persons and demonstrate that in their programs and investments.
The big surprise in this research, however, and I don’t have
time to take you through the entire argument, was that it was rare
to find a liberal arts college that was both very
demanding academically and highly student-oriented. We are
one of those colleges.
In a recent national survey comparing St. Lawrence
faculty members to faculty members at other selective liberal arts
colleges we learned that:
- St. Lawrence faculty members were much more likely to use the
more demanding essay mid-term and final exams
- Were more much more likely to require students to present work
orally
- Were more likely to require that students write term papers or
research papers
- Were more likely to require and review multiple drafts of student
written work
- Were more likely to encourage active learning through class discussions,
cooperative learning and group projects.
What all of us know intuitively is that the more we expect of students,
the more they learn. St. Lawrence faculty members have high expectations
of students. They are very demanding academically.
But what about what Astin has called the level of student-orientation?
Here again we know from national surveys that St. Lawrence students
are more engaged than students at other selective liberal arts colleges
in co-curricular and extra-curricular developmental experiences supported
by the University. We provide a truly rich array of co-curricular
and extra-curricular opportunities meant to encourage development
of the whole student. At the same time—and this is
really important—our students devote more time to
their academic work on average than students at other colleges. We
also know that student-athletes, who make up about 35% of the St.
Lawrence student body, devote as much or more time to their academic
work as non-athletes, perform academically just like non-athletes—a
very rare circumstance in American higher education—and participate
in non-athletic co-curricular activities as frequently as non-athletes.
Our students are well-rounded. We achieve a well-rounded student
body by recruiting and admitting well-rounded students, not by bringing
together a diversity of specialists. St. Lawrence is, indeed, a highly
student-oriented university. It is also a critical strategic goal
of the University that we will become even more student-oriented
even as we continue to be very demanding academically.
This is a wonderful time for you admitted students to be thinking
about coming to St. Lawrence. Investments and initiatives are taking
place all across the curriculum—from the sciences and mathematics,
to the arts, to the humanities and the social sciences. There is
a vitality—a vibrancy—here just now that you should decide
to capture. Never in American history has the need for graduates
of excellent liberal arts colleges been greater. We need people more
than ever who know how to think, how to analyze, how to write and
speak, how to make good moral arguments and value judgments. I believe
in some sense Americans know this, for the demand for admission to
selective liberal arts colleges continues to grow.
Residential liberal arts colleges, of course, are profoundly shaped
by place—by their physical location and the history and culture
of the region in which they reside. St. Lawrence in particular is
shaped by its North Country location. St. Lawrence, you may not appreciate,
is the American liberal arts college located closest to the capital
of a foreign country. [pause] This simple fact of
geography has had very important consequences for the University
for its entire history. Long ago—at least from prior to World
War II—St. Lawrence faculty began to take advantage of the
nearness of Ottawa, Kingston, Montreal, and even Quebec City, to
introduce a first hand comparative dimension to courses in a number
of disciplines. One could, for example, contrast the U. S. Congress
and the Canadian Parliament and then show students a parliament,
because Ottawa is only about an hour and a quarter away.
Over time, our experience of using Canada in this way led more generally
to a heightened readiness on the part of the faculty and the university
to seize the opportunity presented by the Cold War in the 1960’s
to develop programs of study abroad. It was clear to many, and especially
to the St. Lawrence faculty, that having many more college graduates
who understood something about cultures other than our own would
be in the national interest. St. Lawrence plunged in early and with
vigor, so that today about 40% of any given class studies abroad
in one of our 13 programs or an approved program of another college
or university. And over 50% of the faculty have significant international
training and expertise. The curriculum is full of international and
intercultural studies in a great variety of disciplines, including
the sciences, and the campus is always abuzz with debates, forums,
lectures, and discussions about world issues and world events.
So, the uniqueness of our location near Ottawa has led to a critical
distinction—a remarkable institutional emphasis and strength
in a broad variety of programmatic emphases we have come to call “global
studies.” It’s something I believe we do very, very well.
But our location in the North Country also means being close to
the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondacks. It means remembering
that we were on the Underground Railroad as John Brown and his sons
spirited runaway slaves from Lake Champlain through Lake Place and
then across the border at Massena. It means having a strong work
ethic and a lack of pretension. There is nothing snooty about the
North Country. There is instead a kind of honesty and straightforwardness
that I have always found refreshing. Some of what I’m saying
here is described beautifully in the epitaph on the gravestone of
Eben Holden, lead character in that great novel of the North Country
by the same name, and as you now know, also the name of this room.
Written over 100 years ago by our own Irving Bacheller, Class of
1882 and for many years a St. Lawrence trustee, it sold over 1 million
copies. Eben Holden’s epitaph says this:
I AIN’T AFRAID.
‘SHAMED O’ NUTHIN’ I EVER DONE.
ALWUSS KEP’ MY TUGS TIGHT
NEVER SWORE ‘LESS ‘TWAS NEC’SARY,
NEVER KETCHED A FISH BIGGER ‘N ‘TWAS
ER LIED ‘N A HOSS TRADE
ER SHED A TEAR I DIDN’T HEV TO.
NEVER CHEATED ANYBODY BUT EBEN HOLDEN.
GOIN’ OFF SOMEWHERES, BILL—DUNNO THE WAY NUTHER—
DUNNO ‘F IT’S EAST ER WEST ER NORTH ER SOUTH,
ER ROAD ER TRAIL;
BUT I AIN’T AFRAID.
Old Uncle Eb speaks clearly the North Country values of honesty,
straightforwardness, integrity, risk-taking, and self-confidence.
Shaped too by the way in which our location constantly makes us
aware of our physical environment, we are also a university that
is dead serious about science and mathematics. Our success in those
fields occurs, I believe, because we are committed to providing science
and mathematics students with a hands-on, investigative, personally
meaningful, and research-rich educational experience. The image that
often first comes to mind for most people when they hear the phrase “liberal
arts college” is traditional study in the humanistic disciplines,
and of course we do that well. But the nation’s top liberal
arts colleges, among which St. Lawrence is one, graduate proportionately
almost three times as many majors in science and
mathematics as the best American research universities.
The sciences and mathematics are thriving at St. Lawrence just now,
and they are about to thrive even more because we will next spring
begin the first phase of what will be a $60 million program of new
construction and renovation of our science and mathematics facilities.
First up will be our biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and neuroscience
spaces. The number of students working in the summer and throughout
the academic year with science and math faculty members in research
is growing exponentially. Learning science deeply happens best when
one actually does science.
Of course, completion of our new student center allows us also to
give a huge boost to the arts at St. Lawrence. By taking over the
existing Edward John Noble University Center—something that
will happen over the next 8-10 months, the total space devoted to
the arts will double, and we have committed to increasing the number
of faculty and staff support lines in the arts to further enrich
an already exciting set of programs.
There is so much more I’d like to tell you about St. Lawrence
but there is no time. Yogi Berra once said: “When you come
to a fork in the road, take it!” I chose St. Lawrence and I’ve
never looked back. We’d like the opportunity to change the
lives of you prospective students who are visiting with us today.
If St. Lawrence becomes your choice, I can tell you that you will
never regret it. We will work night and day with you to make it happen.
Thank you, and good luck!
