Winter 2000

Then and Now

At our annual “Town-Gown” holiday get-together in Herring-Cole, attended this year by about 150 people from our local community, there was the most wonderful display of photographic portraits and biographies of an extraordinary group of seven early St. Lawrence alumni who were natives of Canton or the immediate vicinity. Prepared by John Clark ’69, the display was meant to illustrate one dimension of the powerful connection between St. Lawrence and Canton. Since the beginning of this University, outstanding local young people have found their way to St. Lawrence and used that experience as a launching pad from which to begin lives or real significance.
Today, of course, the vast majority of our students are not from Canton and the North Country, and St. Lawrence has a regional, national and even international reach that would have been hard to imagine throughout most of the first century of the University’s history. Roughly half the faculty have international expertise and training, we run 12 overseas programs for our students, and a high proportion of the courses from which our students chose deal with global and intercultural themes.
While it is impossible to prove, I believe that this global emphasis – symbolized best right now by the establishment of our new global studies major and our hiring of five new faculty to join the dozen or so existing faculty who conceived of this program – has its origin at least partly in the way faculty here used Canada to expand the horizons of students from much of the University’s history. We are the American liberal arts college located closest to the capital of a foreign country – Ottawa – and Canada’s parliament has long been a natural comparative focus for St. Lawrence students taking courses in government, for example. However local this international emphasis was in the early years, it was enough to stimulate a readiness among faculty to incorporate international study into the St. Lawrence curriculum when that became much more feasible in the 1960’s – a readiness greater, I believe, than at colleges much less rural in location by virtue of our closeness to Canada.
And yet we remain an institution powerfully shaped by our location and its people, and our student body is made stronger and more diverse by top students from Canton and the other small towns of the North Country. Indeed, St. Lawrence has tried continually to be sure that North Country students have been well represented in a student body that, since World War II, has become much more national and international. Today, students from Canton and the North Country represent 17% of our undergraduate enrollment (310 students). Fully 30% of the members of the Phi Beta Kappa, our highest academic honorary society, are North Country students.
One of the reasons we have been able to enroll these students is the very large amount of scholarship endowment generous St. Lawrence graduates with origins in the North Country have provided, restricted to the support of North Country students. Local high schools nominate their best students each year to compete for St. Lawrence North Country and Augsbury Scholarships. Winners receive very significant scholarship support to enable them to attend St. Lawrence, and we typically have 20 or so North Country Scholars in each class.
Many of these students learn about St. Lawrence well ahead of college application time because they have participated in one or more of the programs of outreach we sponsor for local students. For example, the Talented Juniors Program invites students to work with St. Lawrence faculty members on Saturdays during the fall, taking college-level courses not available to them at their high schools. Local high school students can also enroll in coursework at St. Lawrence prior to their high school graduation, or apply to our Young Writers Conference, held on a fall weekend at Canaras. Students from Akwesasne are active participants in our Pre-Collegiate Opportunity Program on campus during the summer. In addition, about 90 North Country students participate, sometimes for several years, in the Upward Bound program on campus. Many other students in local schools are tutored by St. Lawrence students through the Liberty Partnership and the federally-sponsored college work-study tutoring programs in which a great number of our students participate.
Other local students learn about St. Lawrence by attending musical, artistic or athletic events on campus, by using our library, by shopping at the bookstore or by using our athletic facilities for interscholastic competitions. Artists in residence at St. Lawrence, such as the Alexander String Quartet (who will receive an honorary degree at Commencement in May of 2000) and the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, have outreach programs in local schools build into their residencies, sponsored by St. Lawrence. And then, of course, there is North Country Public Radio – one of the very bet NPR stations in the country, in my view.
Around the room in Herring-Cole that day were exhibits of just some of the outstanding Canton women and men who have attended St. Lawrence and gone on to do important things in the world, including for and with St. Lawrence. They are the North Country Scholars of yesteryear, the kinds of people I know our North Country Scholars of today will become. Their names – Leffert Lefferts Buck, Grace Pauline Lynde, Albert Paddock Crary, Lucia Elizabeth Heaton, Georgettie Bacheller Hale, Florence Lee Whitman and Irving Bacheller – are found today all over the North Country and the campus, on streets, bridges, buildings and towns. In fact, this is a representative groups, not a list of all-stars. They are illustrative, not our guess at who should be the top seven.
I was able to announce at our holiday reception the latest addition to our endowment for North Country scholarships, a truly wonderful commitment of $1.5 million from Ledyard P. Hale II ’43 and his wife, Ginny. “Ledge” is the grandson of Georgettie Bacheller Hale. Their gift, an irrevocable commitment form their estate, will help ensure that the next generation of North Country scholars can afford to attend this great liberal arts college of the North Country. And then and the now of St. Lawrence are tightly connected, in this and a great many other ways.