Larry Winston has talked about what St. Lawrence has accomplished, with the help of everyone in this room, in the last decade.  He’s made it clear what we mean by our momentum.  Shel Johnson has announced our new campaign—Momentum St. Lawrence, $200 million in gifts and pledges by December 31, 2010—explained why he thinks we can get it done, and named and thanked those we will be counting on to work with us to accomplish such a wonderful goal. 

As your president, I can tell you that we are rowing a boat in challenging seas with a mission critical for America.  Our ambitions for what we can provide some of the nation’s best students are truly lofty:  we believe we know how to do liberal education better than anyone, and we believe that with enough resources we can deliver as well as any college.  I can tell you also that I know we can do this campaign.  We have the best campaign leadership anywhere; alumni, parents and friends with a generosity of spirit and a commitment to St. Lawrence that is amazing; and we have oarsmen—strong and true, hundreds of them—prepared to move us through the challenging seas to a new place of excellence in liberal education.  How absolutely exciting this is!

A significant piece of this campaign is about sustaining what we’ve done to ensure its impact going forward.  That’s why half of the $200 million goal is for our endowment, and another $35 million is for the St. Lawrence Fund, which supports current operations.  We’ve added people and programs, and we’ve added space to get to where we are.  We must sustain them both into the future, and we will do so.  Our endowment is just too small for the level of enrichment of our programs that we have and aspire to, and for the degree to which we must subsidize most of our students so that they can afford to be at St. Lawrence.  Our top competitors are significantly better endowed.  We simply must begin to catch up.

Another $45 million will allow us to complete two major, large, challenging facilities initiatives:  our 4-phase science and mathematics facilities project, Phase 1 of which is Johnson Hall, and our 6-phase project to increase and enhance our spaces for the arts, ready to move to Phase 3 with the completion of the Newell Center for Arts Technology.  Both of these projects absolutely must be done if we are to realize our goals for students’ education in those fields and ensure our capacity to compete for the best students and faculty in the sciences and the arts.  I want to see both of them fully funded on my watch as your president, and I want to see them and all other facilities projects we undertake reach as high as we can on the commitment to environmental sustainability we adopted in a student-initiated trustee resolution last spring.
All of this, then, is about sustaining and completing what we’ve started.

But I have dreams for St. Lawrence as well, and I believe that in this campaign we will experience some wonderful surprises if we share our dreams with those who can help us realize them and if we continue to demonstrate with our work day in and day out that we deserve transforming support—if we demonstrate, in other words, that we can and will convert transforming support into outcomes that will truly change our students’ lives.

Here are my dreams:

• I dream that St. Lawrence will be able to sustain and strengthen its commitment to socioeconomic diversity.  Today 20% of our student body comes from the lowest quartile of family incomes in America, double the average at our wealthier private college and university competitors; they graduate from St. Lawrence at the same rate and perform as well academically as students from higher-income families who have typically had greater advantages in high school quality and college preparation  (wonderful testimony to their and our hard work); and they go on with the confidence and skill to make a real difference in the world.  Much more than other colleges and universities in rural locations, St. Lawrence has been historically and by tradition the University of Opportunity, as one member of the Class of 1956 said to me at this past June’s reunions for students from the North Country and their equivalent from all over America.  Seventeen per cent of our student body comes from New York’s North Country, and their average family income is significantly below the average for the rest of our student body.  But they are differentially our best students, and they do St. Lawrence proud.  They also leave St. Lawrence with too much loan debt—one of the highest levels of loan debt in our comparison group.  We must somehow find the financial strength to continue this truly great and transforming work so that our neediest students can start their post-St. Lawrence lives with less debt.
• I dream too that we can find the financial strength to continue to increase diversity of other kinds in the student body, faculty and staff that, like socio-economic diversity, we know has powerful impacts on the education of our students.  Going to a co-educational college with engaged students who are different racially, ethnically, in national origin, geographically and other ways means that one more frequently encounters points of view shaped by premises different from ones own.  Years of research shows that diversity produces powerful learning outcomes during college—learning outcomes that persist into later life.  For example, the more diversity experienced in college, the more one’s post-college friends, neighbors, and co-workers are diverse; the more one remains intellectually engaged and motivated; and the higher is one’s civic engagement and democratic participation.  We have seen in the last decade an increase from 4% to 12% in the percentage of first-year students who are U.S. students of color, and the percentage of international students has been as high at 7%.  Over that same time period, the faculty has become more diverse in ways important to our mission, moving from 5% faculty of color to 17%. I dream that we can continue this wonderful trajectory, with its correlated impacts on the education of our students.  I also dream that we can continue to increase the percentage of our students who study abroad, and that we find the resources to dramatically increase our engagement with Canada, that amazing learning opportunity only 20 miles away.  America needs us to produce more graduates with high levels of multi-cultural and multi-national understanding and skill; the world needs it; and our students need it if they are to realize their full potential. 
• I dream that every full professor at St. Lawrence will someday occupy an endowed chair, honored by the University for continued excellence in teaching, for the achievement of a mature and successful program of scholarship, and for leadership in fulfilling the faculty’s role in shared governance.  And I dream that St. Lawrence will have the financial strength to compensate its faculty and staff appropriately for the great work they already do and for their commitment to continue to stretch to enable us to serve our students better and better.  In the end, this place is about people: we need to be able to recruit the best people that we can and we need them to want to go to work every day ready to do inspiring things for and with our students.  There is no other way to achieve excellence in this work.
• I dream that every student at St. Lawrence will be able while here to engage in serious, original research or creative artistic work closely mentored by or in collaboration with a faculty member—that among the nation’s top liberal arts colleges we will develop the financial resources to mount the largest and best such program for undergraduates anywhere.  The essence of what we seek to do with students is something we call “engaged learning.”  It involves organizing the teaching and learning environment so that learning is active, not passive.  We know from outcomes research that when the learning environment is organized this way learning is deeper, students retain what they have learned, they hunger for more, and they are more likely to become lifelong learners.  Intentionally-designed engaged learning environments abound on campus and they involve both academic and co-curricular programming—the First-Year Program, our community-based learning program, and the Leadership Academy are just three.  But one sees it also in the way the faculty approach all of their classes.  In a recent national survey comparing St. Lawrence faculty members to faculty members at other selective liberal arts colleges we learned that:
• St. Lawrence faculty members were much more likely to use the more demanding essay mid-term and final exams
• Were more much more likely to require students to present work orally
• Were more likely to require and review multiple drafts of student written work
• Were more likely to encourage active learning through class discussions, cooperative learning and group projects.

Nowhere in the curriculum is engaged learning happening with more impact than when students, whom we want to become lifelong learners, are in apprentice relationships with faculty mentors who themselves are lifelong learners and discoverers, doing original research, creative writing, or artistic production.  This will require major new resources both to fund the direct costs of this work and to fund the necessary reorganization of faculty time.  Getting this to happen for all students would be big.  If we could do this, St. Lawrence would stand out among liberal arts colleges in the best of ways.

• I dream that all of this and all we are already doing will continue to attract to St. Lawrence students prepared and motivated to take maximum advantage of the richness and quality of our programs, and that the competition to become a student here will grow tougher and tougher because of our growing attractiveness and success.  At the same time, I dream that with success we will never become a “snooty,” the term my friend Mike McPherson, currently president of the Spencer Foundation and formerly provost at Williams, uses to describe our elite northeastern independent college and university competition.  May we never let our growing admissions success allow us to forget who we are, where we came from, and our obligation to lift students up—the University of Opportunity, the candle in the wilderness, the beacon that shows the way.

Momentum St. Lawrence is very importantly about sustaining.  But mark my words:  I believe we will uncover levels of generosity in this campaign that will transform St. Lawrence as well.  You will get this to happen because you and we are dead serious about our work with students, its importance to them, the nation and the world; we are truly good at it and getting better and better; and people with resources and outstanding generosity of spirit are noticing and pulling for us.  Again, life is good.  It doesn’t get any better. 

Thank you, most warmly, for being here with us tonight as we launch this new venture.  And now I’d like to invite Larry and Shel to join me for an unveiling.

And now please join us outside on Creasy Way to ring the Saints victory bell for good luck, and then to see a fireworks display worthy of this great moment for St. Lawrence!  Go Saints!