St. Lawrence University: President

Maybe to some, it looked easy. The money came in fast. How hard could it be? But we can never forget that no-one has to give to St. Lawrence. They must believe we are worth supporting, they must believe in the mission of this place, they must believe that the students we enroll deserve their support. We can’t just tell prospective donors these things are true. They must be true.
Campaign leaders lead first by their own giving. Every one of the trustee campaign leaders you see tonight has made St. Lawrence their top charitable priority. Because they believe in St. Lawrence, they have made it possible for others to believe in St. Lawrence. They have been inspiring in a most remarkable way.
Bruce and Ann Benedict are the best of the best. So often, campaign chairs lend their names and their visibility, and the leadership of their own giving. But then staff do the work, and they manage the campaign passively. Bruce and Ann have given inspiring leadership with their own giving to St. Lawrence, but way, way beyond that Bruce has thought about this campaign every day, every waking hour. He has kept us on track, and he has personally made the case to countless others that they too should be leadership donors. I don’t think any university has ever had a better campaign chair.
Most interesting in this context is a statement Bruce made to a number of us, and I believe also in public, at the 1998 Canaras retreat when we agreed to create the so-called “blue sky” budget for admissions. I recall saying that St. Lawrence must get to the point where it is regularly receiving more than 3,000 applications for admission each year, and that I believed we would do so. Bruce said, in response: “St. Lawrence has never, ever had 3,000 applications and never will. If you ever get more than 3,000 applications, Ann and I will give another $1 million to the campaign.” Said, don’t you agree, like the outstanding campaign chair Bruce has been! Well, Bruce, today—February 20, 2003—we received our 3,000th application for admission to the Class of 2007. We are at 3,005! We will get applications postmarked by our February 15 deadline for several more days. I just wanted you to know. Go Terry!
All of this aside, the most important thing about Campaign St. Lawrence is that it makes it possible for us to imagine a different future for this university. What might that future be? And how will we pursue it in the face of the now much more challenging economic environment in which we will surely have to operate for at least the next several years?

First of all, we have shown ourselves, and the world, that we can raise far more money than anyone thought we could ten years ago. One example of the impact of this on us is our science facilities project. We weren’t, of course, ready to embark on a science facilities project when I arrived in 1996. But if we had decided to, I don’t believe we would have imagined that we could do a project larger than, say $25-$30 million—and even that kind of sum would have looked daunting. That we feel able now to consider a $60 million investment in science and mathematics facilities is testimony to the profound change in our level of confidence in ourselves that Campaign St. Lawrence has engendered. Our sense of the possible has been transformed, profoundly.
We have also shown ourselves that the proceeds of a campaign like ours can be invested in people, programs, and facilities in such a way that our position in the very challenging competition for prospective students can, in time, be altered dramatically, and our ability to retain students to graduation can be increased significantly—all at the same time we improve very significantly our educational outcomes. Our boldness, and our courage, has been rewarded. We made strategic investments precisely at the right time, and a huge latent potential at St. Lawrence has been unleashed. It seems not unreasonable to assume that further courage and boldness will also be rewarded. We have shown that we can get better faster than our competition gets better.

The challenges we face because of the continued stagnation of the economy are today, and likely for the next several years at least, greater than at any time since the 1970’s—a decade of soaring energy prices, stagnant low stock prices, and double-digit inflation. I see evidence everywhere that our public and independent college and university competitors are reeling under the pressure of this situation. We too are under stress. But the strategic investments we have made have situated us to become stronger and more stable in the face of this challenge. Just as this economy is the most challenging economy in three decades, our opportunity to move ahead in admissions competitiveness relative to our top competitors is greater than at any time in that same period. By moving steadily forward in absolute terms, we may very well be able to leap forward in relative terms. Our goal must be to find a way to do that, if at all possible.
That means we must both be stable and appear to be stable in what we provide our students, academically and co-curricularly. We must meet our commitments to our students, and to the faculty and staff whose hard work and committed effort will be essential to our success. St. Lawrence has been the site of striking and powerful educational innovation for a decade and a half—such things as cultural encounters, global studies, the First-Year Program, the Integrated Science Education Initiative and the formation of an undergraduate research culture, our advances in creative writing, the Senior Year Experience, and others. A wonderfully heightened collaboration between our academic and student life efforts has strengthened living-learning communities all across the campus, and our vision for a program of intercollegiate athletics that is first and foremost about learning and student development really sets us apart. We are clear about our direction and what it will take to get there. We must focus our resources in these next years to bring all we have started to fruition.
We must, of course, continue to seek the gift capital necessary to finance our facilities and technology needs. The science project must find its way to completion on a reasonable timetable, and other needs will require our attention. We will be working hard in the next six months to a year to see what might be possible in the way of leadership gifts for the next phases of our facilities program.
Very importantly, as we conceptualize where our fund raising program goes from here, we must try to imagine how we might double, or even triple, our efforts to secure new endowment. I’d like to see us have as a goal securing new endowed professorships such that at least half of full professors might have the opportunity for that very special recognition beyond promotion to full professor. Our need for endowment for scholarships is almost bottomless, and nothing will assure the diversity of the student body going forward more than a substantial increase in our endowment in this area. And we need to structure our requests for support for facilities construction and renovation to include an endowment component, so that more of our new maintenance and depreciation costs will be covered through endowed funds.
Continuing to build the base of annual operating support must also be a top priority. The St. Lawrence Fund is the foundation of our fund raising program. If it is not strong and growing, the whole program will struggle.
Five years ago, when times last seemed especially challenging after a couple of difficult admissions years, we said to each other that “we must not blink.” We must say that to ourselves again. We must be prudent, cautious, and careful, to be sure, but we must also be ambitious, visionary, and bold when and where we can. I know we can do this.