Colleagues
and distinguished guests, faculty, trustees, parents, friends and
family of graduating seniors and masters candidates, members of
the wider St. Lawrence family, and—most of all—graduating
seniors and masters candidates, whether you are summa cum laude,
magna cum laude, cum laude, or “thank you Lordy,” a
very warm welcome to this, the commencement ceremony of the Class
of 2005.
I have really good news for the seniors and master’s degree
candidates here today to receive their degrees. My recent hip replacement
limits how long I can stand. Since I must speak standing, it also
limits how long I can speak! I can’t vouch for what speakers
later in the program will do, but from me you will hear remarks
with a very sharp focus.
When I came back to St. Lawrence to be president in 1996 - my
alma mater, soon to be your alma mater - one of the first things
I did was take several days to see every square foot of space the
University owned. It was revealing, and the challenge we would
face of a major facilities renewal on my watch was very clear.
Especially challenging, given my years in another life of seeking
reform and improvement in undergraduate science and mathematics
education nationally, were the science and mathematics facilities
I saw. Last attended to over 30 years earlier, despite heroic efforts
by faculty to torque them around so that they would be serviceable,
the needs were huge. Undergraduate science and mathematics education
was being transformed everywhere into an enterprise that was more
and more “hands on,” investigative, and research rich—where
students learned science and mathematics increasingly by doing
it as an apprentice with a faculty mentor, and where some students
even rose to be full collaborators in the research of their mentors.
But there was little space available in St. Lawrence’s science
and mathematics facilities to foster and nurture that growing pattern.
Science faculty had become discouraged, believing that the University
would never get to their needs. So their hopes were not high, and
as realists they had adjusted their programs and their expectations
to fit the spaces available.
But this was an issue we just had to tackle. So we embarked on
a major collaborative process to decide where science and mathematics
would go at St. Lawrence in the 21 st century. Especially important
to that discussion was the question of how important serious student
research under the mentorship of a faculty member would be in a
science education for the 21 st century? The conclusion: extremely
important, and so science faculty members initiated major investments
to increase the opportunities students have to do research, and
to reformulate class experiences from the first-year through the
senior year so that they are more investigative, more “hands
on”, more “laboratory rich.”
Today, nearly all students majoring in science or mathematics
undertake serious research of an open-ended kind, and a growing
number of students actually co-author papers with faculty members
that are eventually published. At our April 21 Festival of Science
eight students gave major oral presentations of their research,
on such topics as: “Population Structure and Grazing Impact
of an Important Beef Herbivore, Diadema antillarum, in San Salvador,
Bahamas;” “Get Connected: Understanding Reality Through ‘Small-World’ Graphs;” “Synthesis
of Cyanoguanidines as Potential Vanilloid Receptor Ligands;” “Classical
Galois Theory;” “An Assessment of Climber’s Perspectives
of Resource Impact in the Adirondack Park;” “The Cold
Fusion of Autism: Facilitated Communication;” “ The
Interfaces Between Allopathic and Traditional Chinese Medicine;” and “On
a Conjecture of Erdos.” An additional sixty-eight students
presented poster abstracts. The presenters’ excitement and
pride was palpable, the quality of their work evident, and the
interest and enthusiasm of the attendees was high.
Many of these students were able to conduct some of their research
while on paid summer fellowships here at St. Lawrence or overseas,
funded either by faculty research grants or our growing program
of University Fellowships which, in turn, is funded both by private
gifts and my president’s discretionary fund. For the past
two summers these students have lived in our senior townhouses
in a student research community, sharing their work with each other
and providing mutual support.
But the missing piece in all of this—the huge barrier against
which faculty and students have had to work these many years—has
been our science and mathematics facilities. The kind of undergraduate
science and mathematics education in which we are engaged absolutely
requires spaces that allow, support, and encourage a research-rich
experience, and that are equipped to make significant measurements
and analysis possible.
I want to report today that yesterday, after our Board of Trustees
meeting, we officially broke ground for a new $36 million facility
for biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and neuroscience—the
Sarah Johnson Redlich ’82 Hall of Science—the first
phase in a four-phase, $60 million program of science and mathematics
facilities improvements. In the fall of 2007—finally—our
wonderfully vital science and mathematics faculty and students
will begin to have facilities to match their creativity and seriousness
of purpose. This is a great day for St. Lawrence, and a truly wonderful
day for St. Lawrence science and mathematics students and faculty.
I wanted you to know.
When you seniors and I met here on the “first night” of
your St. Lawrence life, I said I had five wishes that I hoped would
come true for you here:
- I wished for you that you would be stretched by great teaching
and thoughtful mentoring to the point where the best that is
within you would find its way out.
- I wished for you that you would find here lifelong friends
of the very best kind.
- I wished for you that you will do better than we at making
the world a place of peace and inclusiveness, a place where prosperity
is not just the privilege of a few but the reality for most,
a place where there is real justice.
- I wished for you the opportunity to watch eight straight victories
over Clarkson in hockey, and you did see more victories against
Clarkson than any class in recent memory. Way to go!
- I wished for you that you would come to love this place, as
I came to love it while a student those many years ago.
Only you know if those wishes have come true for you. I so very
much hope that they have, and that you will think of St. Lawrence
as home throughout your life, no matter where you are and what
you are doing, and that you will come back home here many, many
times in the years to come. We are going to miss you, the great
class of 2005.
Thank you!
