Notes for Welcoming Remarks – Fall Admissions Weekend
Daniel F. Sullivan – September 15, 2000

Welcome

• How well I remember the fall of 1960 when I sat like you in a meeting like this, a high school senior from New Jersey considering St. Lawrence. That was 40 years ago! Yikes! I came to St. Lawrence as a freshman in the fall of 1961, graduated four years later after what proved to be a life-transforming undergraduate education, and now have the unparalleled privilege of serving my alma mater as president.
• So, my welcome is not just to this very special place, but to my very special place!
• To give you a sense of the St. Lawrence of today, which is what I want to do this morning, I need first to say something about our history—for it is in the history of a place that you can begin to grasp how a college got its character.
  • St. Lawrence was founded in 1856 by people of the village with financial and moral support from the Universalist Church and the State of New York. As was typical of college foundings in the 19th century, village investors put up the land and some initial capital, the state provided a grant to allow the first building to be built—Richardson Hall, just across the quad and up the hill from here—and the church provided important operating support for a time.
  • In the beginning, there was both a college of arts and sciences and a theological school, with separate boards of trustees. The college of arts and sciences, which is what remains today, was always independent of church control but influenced in subtle and important ways by the affiliation with the theological school. And through maintenance of an active chaplaincy today, we recognize that our students are often on spiritual journeys of widely varying kinds, as well as intellectual journeys, and we seek to support them in that.
  • The first graduate of the school of theology was a woman named Olympia Brown, who received her degree in 1863. She was also the first woman in America to be ordained a minister. You can see her likeness in a stained glass window in Gunnison Chapel. I hope you will take the time to visit Gunnison today. In its simple, straightforward beauty, its architecture says much about St. Lawrence. Tell us, at the end of your day, if you agree.
  • Interestingly, one of the two U.S. Senators from Maine is also named Olympia, but she is not the St. Lawrence alumna who is a U.S. Senator from Maine. That is Susan Collins ’75, recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from her alma mater three years ago. St. Lawrence is the oldest continuously co-educational college or university in New York. We take women’s issues seriously here.
    
• The first two graduates of the college of arts and sciences received their degrees in 1865, just at the end of the Civil War. One of them came from Lowville, just down the road and very much in the North Country, while the other came from Manhattan, a bit farther down the road and very much not the North Country. From the very beginning St. Lawrence has been a wonderful blend of frontier values characteristic of the North Country, and cosmopolitan values originating in the wider world beyond:
  • For example, there is about St. Lawrence a common sense approach to things, a humility and straightforwardness, and a willingness to strike out boldly into the unknown that our North Country forebears have passed on to us. At the same time there is also here something worldly, progressive and reformist, committed to equality, equity and truth-telling—Universalist values joined to our frontier heritage.
  • You can see some of this “one foot in the North Country and one in the wider world” in our distinctive programs. For example, Environmental Studies has both a North Country and a global focus; Canadian Studies ensures that we take advantage of all there is to learn from and about our neighbors to the north; and from this North Country base we send 35-40% of our students overseas to study and have a faculty almost 50% of whom have significant international training and expertise. A bunch of them from a variety of disciplines have established a new Global Studies Program and Major that I hope you’ll ask about while you’re here today.
  • You can also see it in our students who combine the drive and curiosity necessary to perform on a global stage with a love of the North Country and a commitment to an intelligent and balanced use of the wonderfully beautiful and bountiful environment with which we are blessed here.
  • And you can see it in the ways in which our students, faculty and staff organize their recreation—sometimes off on the mountains, lakes, and rivers of the North Country, and other times off to the exciting international cities nearby for a touch of their sophistication and excitement. We are the American liberal arts college that is located closest to the national capital of a foreign country—the Ottawa airport is 1 ¼ hours away by car, and downtown Ottawa and Parliament just a little farther. Our students use the access we have to key nearby Canadian cities as a counterbalance to the rural outdoors of our immediate vicinity.
    
    This is a wonderful location for a college!
• A second message I want to leave with you this morning has to do with our mission. St. Lawrence exists to provide undergraduate students a demanding, challenging, life-transforming liberal arts education. We expect faculty to have ongoing programs of scholarship, because we believe students will learn better how to think, analyze, and write if their faculty are modeling those activities themselves, but the University has no direct research mission. The entirety of our focus is on teaching and student learning, and the faculty here are passionate about getting it right. If some universities and a portion of the nation's professoriate have relegated undergraduate education to second- or third-class status, it is our highest priority—our reason for being. There is a student-centeredness here that our alumni and students believe is distinctive. It is my job to ensure that this is so.
• This passionate commitment to the life of the mind, where faculty model life-long learning and inquiry for students and demand intellectual excellence from them, that is coupled with a passionate commitment to the development of our students as whole persons in a residential learning community—the profound student-centeredness of this place—is truly rare in American higher education.
• Recent research by Alexander Astin of UCLA, reported in a special issue of Daedalus devoted to liberal arts colleges, shows clearly that strength on both of these dimensions is empirically very rare in colleges and universities. Colleges and universities find it hard to be rigorous and demanding, with a faculty made up of teacher/scholars, while at the same time they devote intense attention to the development of students as whole persons. They drift in one direction or the other. Increasingly, the faculty at elite colleges behave like faculty at research universities—focused intensely on their research with little time for students. At the same time, without the financial resources of a St. Lawrence, most liberal arts colleges cannot afford the level of academic excellence we take for granted. They can seek to excel at student-centeredness, but they cannot simultaneously compete with the best academically.
• What Astin’s research also clearly shows is that it is selective residential liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence—among all other kinds of institutions in America—that have the broadest and best learning and lifetime satisfaction outcomes. And second, among residential liberal arts colleges, it is those that come closest to being both strong and demanding academically and profoundly student-centered that get it most right of all.
• While colleges and universities that do both things well are rare, we know here at St. Lawrence that today’s parents and students seek both. This is not something they do based on knowledge of the literature on student outcomes. It is something they know intuitively that they should want. And they are right!
• What I want you to leave here today understanding is our deep commitment to a simultaneous emphasis on both dimensions of an outstanding undergraduate education—a rigorous, demanding pursuit of the life of the mind and a relentless, committed devotion to the development of students as whole persons.
• The evidence of this is everywhere at St. Lawrence and we are investing aggressively in both dimensions of this university:
• Because there is no substitute in a liberal arts college for ample opportunity for students to have one-on-one contact with faculty, we have in the last three years added 17 full-time tenure-track positions to the faculty at St. Lawrence to make this even easier for students. We will likely add several more in the next few years as we receive new gifts for endowed professorships. In this time of financial stress in higher education, we are most unusual in our strategic commitment to faculty building. While we already have one of the lowest student-faculty ratios among liberal arts colleges, when we are done we will truly have one of the richest faculty resources for students anywhere.
• Overall, right now about 60% of our students manage to do research with or under the supervision of a faculty member during their time at St. Lawrence. To ensure that even more students can have the kind of special mentoring that happens when students actually collaborate with a faculty member, we have established the University Fellows Program, a highly competitive opportunity for 20 students to do research with faculty in the summer. Students receive room and board and a stipend so that they can afford to be here in Canton for the summer, not off working elsewhere to earn money for the next year’s college expenses. A major Big Ten university with the largest program of this kind I know of boasts that 600 undergraduates do research closely supervised by faculty each year, out of over 40,000, or about 1.5%, compared to the 60% figure for St. Lawrence.
• Because it is necessary that it be so, our library is top quality, whether one examines collection size, sophistication and availability of information access technology, staff size or staff quality. Our recent Middle States accreditation review confirmed this. Over a very long time, St. Lawrence has made its library one of its most important investments. And we have just completed a $6 million renovation of the library, which will add 10-15 years to its holding capacity. It is a place where exceptional students and faculty pursue serious study in the liberal arts amid a rich array of scholarly resources.
• Our international programs and rate of student participation in them are among the best nationally. St. Lawrence faculty have been wonderfully thoughtful and creative in this area for a long time. About 35% of St. Lawrence students since the late 1960’s have studied abroad, and nearly 20% of those have attended our own unusual and highly-regarded program in Kenya, now 25 years old. In addition, as I said earlier, we are the American liberal arts college located closest to the capital of a foreign country, and we take advantage of that with distinguished offerings in Canadian Studies.
• Few people understand that selective independent liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence graduate much higher percentages of their students with a major in natural science or mathematics than any of the comprehensive research universities. Among all American liberal arts colleges, we rank 31st in the number of our graduates who have earned PhDs in science or mathematics over the last decade. We rank fifth nationally among all colleges and universities—behind Cal Tech and three others—in the percentage of our graduates who have earned a Ph.D. in one of the earth sciences in the last ten years. And we possess one of the rare undergraduate mathematics departments whose teaching evaluations rank consistently and greatly above the all-faculty average. If I were thinking of majoring in science or mathematics today, I would attend a strong liberal arts college.
• St. Lawrence has an absolutely top quality information technology network, with an infrastructure investment made 10 years ago and maintained since, significantly ahead of our competitors. And our information technology people have a strongly student-centered attitude—something our students appreciate a great deal. I spoke earlier about our historic and presently large investment annually in our library; we spend as much each year on information technology as we do on the library. Both are critical and absolutely necessary in a modern liberal arts college.
• Finally—and I mention this because it is so important to the kind of student who chooses St. Lawrence—we have absolutely top quality programs in recreation and athletics. We offer 32 intercollegiate sports, including Division I men’s and women’s hockey where we are the smallest college with a Division I program but compete successfully with the likes of Harvard, BU, Princeton, Cornell and others—a David competing against many Goliaths. And as you will see as you walk around the campus, we are investing about $25 million over a period of years to upgrade our recreation and athletic facilities for all students and members of our community.
• One other thing distinguishes intercollegiate athletics at St. Lawrence:
• Here the competitiveness of our programs attracts top academic students who want to approach an athletic experience with as much seriousness of purpose as they approach their studies. Almost all of our teams maintain grade-point averages above the all-men’s and all-women’s averages. For example, last year’s final-four men’s hockey team had a grade-point average of almost 3.1; the valedictorian of the senior class was a member of the team; and two graduating seniors were members of Phi Beta Kappa.
• These things I mention because they can be documented readily. In many other less tangible ways St. Lawrence also ranks among the best liberal arts colleges. I will say again, however, that this university has never sacrificed its commitment to community while it pursues excellence in its academic and other offerings. It is important to us that students love this place, and that they leave here wanting to maintain a lifelong relationship. Our alumni will tell you that it is so.
• I want to close by reading you a short passage from what is perhaps deservedly the most famous novel of the North Country—Eben Holden, written by St. Lawrence alumnus and trustee Irving Bacheller and published just before the turn of the century. It sold over 250,000 copies in hard cover at the time. In this passage, Bacheller writes about the spectacular beauty of this place in winter, and about coming home to his beloved North Country. It describes what our students say they feel when they near St. Lawrence coming back from breaks, what our alumni say they feel as they are returning for reunions and other events, and what I personally feel every time I return to my St. Lawrence home.
• “The north country lay buried in the snow that Christmastime. Here and there the steam plough had thrown its furrows, on either side of the railroad, high above the window line. The fences were muffled in long ridges of snow, their stakes showing like pins in a cushion of white velvet. Some of the small trees on the edge of the big timber stood overdrifted to their boughs. . . . The frosty nap of the snow glowed far and near with pulsing glints of pale sapphire. . . . I have never seen such a glory of the morning as when the sun came up, that day we were nearing home, and lit the splendour of the hills, there in the land I love.”
• I hope you have a spectacular visit with us today. You have my very best wishes as you continue your college search. If your search ends at St. Lawrence, we will be here to welcome you most warmly next fall to this very special place. Thank you!
• And now I’d like to introduce Joe Blanchfield, a senior from Cambridge, New York, and president of St. Lawrence’s student government, who would also like to say a few words.