Last Word - Spring 2006
Mentors

St. Lawrence faculty members are demanding while employing a highly student-oriented approach to teaching and learning.  They are about the business of engaging students in active learning.
Every student is encouraged to develop a mentor/apprentice relationship with a faculty member, and faculty are supported in mentoring students.  In such relationships students get to watch, and perhaps even collaborate with, a professor as he or she pursues his or her own scholarship.  Students learn how scholars in a discipline think, how they decide what they believe to be true, and how scholarly outcomes are communicated.  As they begin to undertake real scholarship themselves, they benefit from faculty advice, “loving criticism,” and encouragement. 

When I talk with alumni about their experiences at St. Lawrence, faculty mentors whose teaching and/or advice made a significant difference inevitably come into the conversation.  As a member of the Class of 1965, my faculty mentors included “Doc” Delmage ’33 of English, who was advisor to ODK (at that time the men’s leadership honorary); Barbara Williams in sociology (she inspired me to become a sociologist—an absolutely outstanding teacher and mentor); and Dan O’Connor in Religion (I still have and treasure his book Peter in Rome, which he published when I was a student—my neighbor today, he probably doesn’t know I think of him as a mentor). 

When I went away to St. Lawrence, my father, himself an educator, gave me a terrific piece of advice that I give to students today: “Find out who the best teachers are and whatever they teach, take it.”  There were wonderful teachers and mentors throughout the faculty when I was a student; they are everywhere in the faculty today.

In a residential liberal arts college devoted, as St. Lawrence is, to educating the whole person, students find mentors as well among staff and coaches.  A coach or administrator may help students with leadership development, thinking through a personal dilemma, working out a challenge or digging out of a hole—all the time modeling ways to live and work.  Students get to know staff members through work-study jobs, through involvement in student activities, student government, clubs and honor societies, and sometimes even when they run afoul of the student code of conduct. 

My list of mentors among staff and coaches is longer, and I suspect I am not unusual.   Athletes spend far more time with their coaches than they do with faculty, which is why the hiring of coaches is so important.  All of my coaches—Tom Cartmill and Bob Goodwin in soccer, Bob Sheldon in basketball, and George Menard in baseball—were mentors, and one could not be an athlete at St. Lawrence at the time and not be affected by athletic trainer “Doc” Littlejohn and the legendary Ron Burkman ’28.  Dick Baldwin ’54, the sports information director, rode with us to away games in University station wagons; since almost no road games were close to Canton, there were hours of good conversation and much to learn.

Among administrators, Walt Baumhoff, a man of real discernment and judgment, was dean of freshman men and remains a friend and mentor to this day.  Herman Kirkpatrick, dean of men, watched out for Ann and me after we were married and lived in Vetsville.  In contrast to today, there were perhaps 40 or 50 married student couples at St. Lawrence then.  Herm paid special attention to us and others as we dealt with the added complexity of being married students.  Joanne Stiles (who later married one of my classmates and best friends David Laird ’65, now a University trustee) was dean of women.  She helped transform student life at St. Lawrence by working with others to eliminate the double standard that governed the University’s approach to its women students.

Gene Bewkes was president for my first two years; we often picked up the Sunday newspaper at the same time at the news shop downtown and developed a pattern of stopping to talk for a while.  Later, when he was president of the Edward John Noble Foundation and I had received an Edward John Noble Leadership Fellowship to study at Columbia, he would call Ann and me to see if our money was holding up.  He epitomized the way St. Lawrence faculty and staff continue to influence the lives of alumni well after graduation.

When I had some issues with the University’s administration, Foster Brown ’33, who followed Gene Bewkes, taught me that the president’s door should be open to students, something that I have tried never to forget.  When you were with him, you had his full attention and he always did what he said he would do.

This meander down memory lane illustrates and celebrates the mentoring St. Lawrence has tried to provide its students both historically and today.  A St. Lawrence education should be demanding.  But it should also be personal.  Each student’s education should be hand-crafted in a partnership between student and mentors.  If we can continue to do that, I know St. Lawrence will thrive long into the future.