The theme of this issue of the magazine, in our
sesquicentennial year, is “pioneering steps.” It
features significant historic events, decisions, and changes
of direction that shaped the St. Lawrence of today in important
ways: The rapid and extensive early development of women’s
sports, where St. Lawrence went farther faster after Title IX
than other colleges and universities; the story of Olympia Brown
as the first woman ordained a minister in America, and the impact
on the University of its Universalist heritage; the St. Lawrence
career and life of Jeffrey Campbell ’33,
the first known African American graduate of the University
and of its Universalist Theological School; the long-standing
and unusual level of alumni volunteerism and leadership on
behalf of St. Lawrence, evidenced especially in the work over
time of our Alumni Council; and a round-up of innovative and
pioneering academic programs.
In our part of American
higher education—that of the selective,
independent liberal arts college—St. Lawrence is widely
known as an educational pioneer. This magazine describes
our First-Year Program, about to have its 20th anniversary;
our program and major in Canadian studies; our early establishment
of a program and major in environmental studies; our semester
(and now also summer) program in Kenya, the oldest continuously
operating American overseas program in Africa; and our recently
established Adirondack Semester Program. All of these
programs were pioneers at the time of their establishment,
and all have found their way into the curriculum as ongoing
commitments.
Today, early-stage ventures in gestation
or beginning implementation, some more pioneering than others,
include a new Center for Arts Technology in space to be renovated
this coming summer in the Edward John Noble Center; our Rhetoric,
Communication, and 21st Century Literacies Initiative; our
new Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership, funded by
the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
and the Charles Engelhard Foundation; a new student advising
initiative we have called “Cultivating
Student Intentionality in Academic Planning”; and our
burgeoning and very successful University Fellows program,
in which students work with faculty members on real research,
primarily on campus in the summer housed together in our townhouse
complex where they become a student research community, but
also in special circumstances overseas. Our science and
mathematics departments, especially, are committed to the creation
of a student-faculty research culture and work with dozens of
students each year in this way.
One example of how our liberal
arts colleagues nationally see us is the extent to which
faculty and University leaders are invited to present their
work at national conferences on liberal education curriculum
and pedagogy, most especially those of the AAC&U,
on whose board I now sit, where academic dean Grant Cornwell ’79
serves in a leadership role, and where St. Lawrence faculty
participation is a fixture at national meetings. Another
is the frequency with which we are invited, along with other
selective liberal arts colleges, to compete for grants in
support of curricular and pedagogical innovation from such national
sources as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation,
the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, the Teagle
Foundation, the Freeman Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst
Foundation and others, and the high rate of competitive success
we have with our proposals.
Where does
this innovativeness and pioneering spirit come from? I
can’t say
where it came from originally and specifically, but I do
know that it is a deeply embedded part of the faculty culture
here. Candidates for faculty
positions sense it immediately when they come for recruiting
visits. They
encounter faculty who are constantly talking about teaching
and learning and feel supported by the administration in
that work, and who are always hatching new plans for how
to get liberal arts education more right here and how to
engage students better in the quest for such an education. Turning
their ideas into successful proposals, and then into successful
and enduring innovations, is easy.
I hope you
enjoy this issue of the magazine. In this sesquicentennial
year it allows us to bring to the foreground some of the
ways in which St. Lawrence is unique, unusual, and successful. Working
on these things together, in the context of our history and
traditions, is what makes us enjoy this place so.
Daniel F. Sullivan, President
