St. Lawrence University: President

Well, it was just a year ago that we gathered on the lawn in the historic center of this historic campus, on a spectacular North Country day, while you welcomed Ann and me and our family back to Canton. It felt great to be back then; it feels great to be back now. We have so much to do, but the upside for this place is spectacular if we do it. That’s really what this campaign is about¾stepping up boldly and ambitiously in pursuit of the very best we can do for some of the nation’s most deserving young people.

I am incredibly optimistic about St. Lawrence and its future. I love our chances because of the strength of this place and its people. We have great students. Those of you who are here just for this leadership weekend and campaign kickoff, talk to our students. You will be mightily impressed. Like our first two graduates, they come both from the North Country and the wider world—from America and abroad. They have all of the practical concerns about their future that characterize today’s young people, but these are balanced, you will find, with idealism and commitments to service which we have tried to nurture in them from their very first day here. Working with them is renewing and refreshing; they are St. Lawrence’s reason for being.

We have thousands of alumni—the students of last year and decades ago—who care deeply about St. Lawrence and who believe there must be liberal arts colleges of excellence if the nation and the world are to have any hope whatsoever of a future that is both humane and productive. Only in America is there this tradition of alumni financial and other support of alma mater. We are blessed, and we are grateful.
We have the support of countless parents and friends who share in our vision and believe strongly in its importance. Successful colleges are a partnership, and we feel daily the encouragement and collaboration of many partners.

We have administrators and hourly staff who work to make everything happen, not just as a job, but as a vocation. We live in a wonderful community, which both nourishes and challenges us, and is the setting for the beautiful campus which we get to enjoy each day, all seasons of the year. And finally, there is our beloved North Country, which has shaped St. Lawrence in so many ways and which is the larger setting for the enormous and important work in which we are engaged.

Some—the supremely unenlightened of the world—think of our North Country location as a handicap. One of our own college songs says, “To the college on the hill in that far off northern land. . .” But sometimes places which once seemed like the periphery slowly become the center. I believe that has happened to us, and I wouldn’t trade our location for that of any other college. Think not of St. Lawrence as on the northern edge of New York State, but in the middle of the St. Lawrence River Valley, bordered on the southeast and east by the incredible beauty of the Adirondacks; near the St. Lawrence River and its fabled Thousand Islands; bordered on the north by the Laurentians; and near several diverse, enormously cultured, and fascinating international cities. Ottawa is an hour and 15 minutes away (if you drive with me!), Kingston is an hour and a half, Montreal is two hours, Toronto is three, and Quebec City is five. No other American college or university has such access to Canada, and when one takes advantage of this access there are rich rewards. We benefit simultaneously from a wonderful rural environment, with its mountains, lakes, and one of the world’s most scenic rivers, and, at the same time we have these great and interesting Canadian urban cultural centers.

We are led not to see this by our maps. The map of New York shows us on the periphery of the state. In a different color it shows a small portion of Canada across the river which looks like the outer darkness. The same is true of Canadian maps of Ontario. It’s just that for them, we are the outer darkness. But we are really in the center of an AmeriCanadian geo-economic region, not on the periphery of New York or Ontario, and watch out when prospective students, with our help, discover this. Who would ever have thunk it—St. Lawrence at the geographic center of the universe!

I believe we are also at the center of what is good and enduring in liberal education in America, while at the same time we explore the new with enthusiasm. We are a university where tradition matters—where the chimes in Gunnison Chapel still ring every evening at 5:00 p.m., where tappings for ODK still happen on the library quad, and where class colors weave in and out the rows of the chapel at Moving Up Day ceremonies—but we are also in many ways at the cutting edge of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy, as we seek to get it ever more right for our students. The most recent example of this is our new Ford Foundation grant to help us continue to rethink what it means to engage in area studies, a grant won in competition with the best colleges and universities in America, and a strong signal that a real vitality exists here in the faculty.

These wonderfully productive tensions that are St. Lawrence are symbolized beautifully for me in the geographic origins of our first graduates. Our first commencement occurred in the spring of 1865, at the very end of the Civil War, and nine years after our official founding in 1856. There were just two graduates—Delos McCurdy of New York City, and Hiram H. Ryel of Lowville. That one was from New York City and the other from Lowville illustrates how even then St. Lawrence straddled its North Country world and the wider, more cosmopolitan world beyond—a foot in both places, characteristic of the university still today. So you can see some of why I am so optimistic about this place.

All of us who are here tonight have dreams for the future of St. Lawrence, not just memories of our traditions. We are here to celebrate together our mutual commitment to the continued excellence of this great university. That mutual commitment comes together in Campaign St. Lawrence which is a critical part—but only a part—of a larger strategic and financial plan.

That plan includes components like these:

• Gradually make St. Lawrence more affordable by bringing the rate of tuition increases down as close to the rate of inflation as possible so that tuition increases approximate future increases in families’ ability to pay, thus enabling the university to stabilize, and perhaps even decrease, its institutionally funded student grant budget. At the same time, increase the proportion of student scholarship aid that is funded by spendable gifts and endowment income.

• Stabilize the size of the incoming first-year class at 550 students (which is both fewer than
previous planning assumptions and more than we achieved this year); maintain current overall enrollment by improving retention.

• Increase the size of the faculty as retirements allow us to replace two retiring faculty with three junior faculty, or when new faculty can be added with stable funding from gifts or new endowment; decrease the size of the administration somewhat, as attrition allows.

You can obviously see the impact of past and future gifts on this plan, but you can also see, I think, how Campaign St. Lawrence fits into a larger whole. Our goal for Campaign St. Lawrence is $75 million. The good news is that $40 million has already been given and pledged. That leaves $35 million yet to raise by the end of the century—that’s this century!

We have many needs, of course, and so there are dozens of ways to help. I want to focus on three: faculty, student scholarships, and facilities and technology renewal and expansion.

St. Lawrence needs a larger faculty—perhaps as many as 20 more full-time faculty on top of today’s 155. Now I have to tell you that many college presidents yearn to have fewer faculty, because faculty are sometimes angular, critical, challenging, independent, difficult, and smarter than the president. But given a choice, I would always have more, precisely because faculty are angular, critical, challenging, independent, difficult, and often smarter than the president, and because of the marvelous things they teach our students.

Even more important than all of this is our need to provide students, across the board, with as intensive, hands-on, investigative, research-rich, and personal an education in their majors as we provide them in our well-known First-Year Program. We must do both to be true to our trust, and to do both we need more faculty. We seek in this campaign $10 million in new gifts for endowed faculty chairs and other critical support for faculty.

St. Lawrence also needs new endowment and expendable funds to ensure that students of modest family financial resources can continue to attend without causing erosion in the quality of our programs and facilities. You all know how, and probably also why, tuition at St. Lawrence and all other independent colleges and universities has soared over the past decade and a half. I believe that those tuition increases were partly unavoidable responses to an erosion in the level of commitment to financing students’ education by some of our partners in higher education funding (government, for example) and to dramatically increased demand for services by parents and students that we had to meet because our competitors were meeting it. At the same time, we did not control costs well enough, and so, in retrospect, tuition did not have to rise as fast or as far.

During the last decade we have protected most families against the impact of these tuition increases by allocating increasing amounts of unrestricted university funding to student financial aid. Today only about 15% of the nearly $18 million we provide in student scholarship grant aid is funded by restricted endowment income or spendable gifts for that purpose. If we keep tuition increases as close to the rate of inflation as we can, so families can afford them, our need for student scholarships should stabilize or even decline with time.
But critical investments in programs and facilities directly related to students’ education are constrained when our scholarship budget is funded so extensively by unrestricted funds. We need substantial increases in our endowment for scholarships and in spendable gifts for student scholarships if St. Lawrence is to finance necessary improvements in programs and facilities while at the same time we maintain our commitment to being accessible to students from families with modest financial means. I cannot imagine a St. Lawrence that does not continue this kind of commitment. We need $23 million in this campaign as part of that effort.

Finally, St. Lawrence needs $16 million in this campaign to add to existing funds and future operating budget allocations to begin and execute a ten-year plan of facilities and technology investment and renewal. Needs exist across the full range of our programs--academic, recreational and athletic, residential and student life--and I have described them for you in my latest column in the St. Lawrence Magazine, and Tom Coakley did so for many of you today at his afternoon presentation. To do it all would require some $9 million per year for a decade. We won’t be able to afford it all, but we must find a way to accomplish the lion’s share. We have some $10 million in hand now in cash; we can get another chunk from annual allocations in the operating budget; but we need substantial gifts in Campaign St. Lawrence to make our facilities and technology investment program realizable.

We plan to move ahead with several key projects immediately¾library renovation, renovation of Dana Dining Hall, movement of the bookstore to a renovated Brewer Field House (necessitating the construction of an alternative storage facility), and athletic facility planning, with an eye to beginning our first project in that area next summer. Our ability to meet critical other needs in science, the arts, and student and residential life in a timely way is totally dependent on the success of this campaign we announce officially tonight.