Welcome and Remarks
Commencement—St. Lawrence University
Daniel F. Sullivan—May 20, 2007
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 2007.
When you arrived on campus in August of 2003 I told you
that “the
education you would receive at St. Lawrence is ‘in the
liberal arts.’ It is not professional education,
or technical education, or vocational education—it is education
for a life, education that inspires students to be lifelong learners,
education that prepares students to make a difference in a wide
array of careers, education that encourages students to find
meaning in what they do, and to better understand the great issues
and questions that are at the center of the quest to be a learned,
educated person.” I told you that only 3% of American
colleges and universities have education in the liberal arts
as their primary mission and so you would become part of a very
special tradition—and now you have! A warm congratulations.
But
I’d
like to say some more to you about liberal education before you go. Recently,
Ann and I viewed an hour-long PBS program on dyslexia, and one of the points
that was made has a clear parallel to liberal education: “Until
universal literacy became a requirement for even minimal participation in American
society, dyslexia—a learning disability of neurological origin which
causes difficulty with reading and writing—remained undiscovered.” When
it became critical for everyone to be able to read, the incentive grew to understand
why a substantial group—some say as many as 10% of the population—of
otherwise intelligent persons had enormous difficulties in learning to read.
In
many respects an analogous situation applies to our need for
liberal education in the world of today. Industrial societies need vast numbers of factory
workers to do routine, repetitive tasks that do not involve such things as
analysis, synthesis, teamwork and problem-solving, high-level written and communication
skills, critical and creative thinking, intercultural knowledge and competence,
quantitative literacy and information literacy. Managers, leaders and
professionals need such skills in industrial society, but they are a relatively
small fraction of the workforce. As manufacturing evolves from “mass
production” technology to “continuous process” technology,
where much of product creation and assembly are done by machines and robots
that workers monitor, adjust and repair, and where labor costs are a smaller
fraction of overall production costs, factory workers also increasingly need
the advanced skills I note above while manufacturing that is still best done
in a “mass production” way moves to less developed societies. In
manufacturing involving continuous process technology, the fraction of employment
that is managerial and technical grows while the fraction devoted directly
to production declines.
As the manufacturing
sector of an advanced economy becomes smaller in terms numbers
of workers employed and the services sector grows, those high-level
skills are in even greater demand. This is so even in traditional blue-collar service jobs—the
complexity of today’s plumbing and electrical systems, for example, also
requires plumbers and electricians who can analyze, synthesize, problem-solve
and communicate.
In short,
just as dyslexia was “discovered” when universal literacy became
a basic societal necessity, liberal education is being “discovered” in
new ways as the skills, habits of mind and personal attributes we associate
with a liberally educated person become more and more necessary for almost
any kind of work and life in a modern society like ours—indeed,
an almost universal necessity.
The Universal Necessity of Liberal Education
That is the basic premise of “Liberal Education and America’s
Promise (LEAP),” an exciting decade-long initiative of
the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
begun in 2005, its 90th anniversary year. For several years
I have been on the board of AAC&U, and this year I am chair-elect
and will become chair in January 2008. AAC&U, with
over 1,100 colleges and universities of every type and size in
its membership, is “the only major higher education association
whose sole focus is the quality of student learning in the college
years,” and the only association devoted to fostering liberal
education. LEAP’s core principle is that not only
should liberal education be the central focus of post-secondary
education of all types, but that it should also be the primary
focus of K-12 education—our “education for all”—as
well. It is not just for students planning to go to college. To
repeat, today’s “vocational” education must
also be liberal education, for success in what we have historically
called “blue-collar work” is also dependent on acquiring
the skills, habits of mind and forms of personal commitment of
the liberally educated person.
There is
growing evidence that the American public gets this even as it
is more and more clear that federal government higher education
leaders and much of the Congress do not. At our January AAC&U meeting we released the results
of a major survey of American business leaders—mostly chief executive
officers of companies of a variety of sizes—and recent college graduates. Let
me quote from the report to summarize the findings:
Employers and recent college
graduates reject a higher education approach that focuses narrowly
on providing knowledge and skills in a specific field; majorities
instead believe that an undergraduate college education should
provide a balance of a well-rounded education and knowledge
and skills in a specific field. They
particularly emphasize the importance of providing students with .
. . .experience putting [their] knowledge and skills to practical
use in “real-world” settings.
Large majorities of employers think that colleges and universities
should place more emphasis on:
- Integrative learning, including the ability to apply knowledge
and skills to real-world settings through internships or other
hands-on experiences.
- Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural
world, including concepts and new developments in science and
technology; global issues and developments and their implications
for the future; the role of the United States in the world;
and cultural values and traditions in America and other countries.
- Intellectual and practical skills, such as teamwork skills
and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group
settings; the ability to communicate effectively orally and
in writing; critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills;
the ability to locate, organize and evaluate information from
multiple sources; the ability to be innovative and think creatively;
the ability to solve complex problems; and quantitative reasoning.
- Personal and social responsibility, including knowledge of
global issues and developments and their implications for the
future; and a sense of integrity and ethics.
The survey also indicates that there is an increasing national
recognition of the importance of science and mathematics education,
both as a key element of liberal education and because of the
critical contribution science and mathematics education plays
and will play in making possible the technological and other
innovations necessary to produce a growing world economy that
is environmentally sustainable. Of course, St. Lawrence
and the rest of the nation’s selective liberal arts colleges
got this long ago. Selective liberal arts colleges, for
over a half-century, have produced 2.5 to 3 times as many baccalaureate
degrees in science and mathematics as research universities and
other kinds of undergraduate institutions on a proportional basis: typically
from 25-40% of their graduates. The only problem is that
the total enrollments of the top 60 American liberal arts colleges
can fit comfortably in the University of Michigan’s football
stadium! We are way out ahead, we are too few to change
the big picture by ourselves, and we have to help the rest of
the nation catch up.
But almost
every day we read in the newspaper of efforts by Margaret Spellings,
U. S. Secretary of Education, to dumb down the education for
life we seek to provide at St. Lawrence and substitute something
that is woefully inferior. Last
fall the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education—the so-called “Spellings
Commission”—released its report, meant to be a bold outline for
how higher education in America should be reformed to meet the needs of students
and the nation in the 21st century. Instead, it is in its major
thrusts in my view a national embarrassment. Much of the report is critical
of both the system of higher education in America and the performance of the
thousands of individual institutions that make up this system. Some of
the criticism is deserved, if not uniformly across all sectors within higher
education or across all institutions, but the report is a crude document which
makes sweeping claims about the quality and effectiveness higher education
as a whole.
The medicines proposed for curing the problems will in most
cases only make things worse. I focus here on the Commission’s
total failure to provide any guidance on what a high-quality,
21st century higher education should in fact be. There
are only brief suggestions in the report that reading, writing,
critical thinking, problem-solving, mathematical and scientific
literacy should be important learning outcomes from higher education. In
contrast, much more space is devoted to the need the Commission
sees to reduce barriers students might encounter as they seek
to transfer credits from one institution to another or from for-profit
institutions to traditional colleges and universities even
as institutions are criticized for rates of retention to graduation
that are too low. The vision of higher education
suggested in the report is a cafeteria, “grab and go” system
about as far removed from intentional, serious, dedicated, and
demanding study as one can get. And in the entire document,
the word “faculty” is used only once, in an aside,
as if the future strength and vitality of the nation’s
professoriate were somehow irrelevant to creating and sustaining
excellent higher education in the 21st century. In contrast,
I suspect there is not one of you in the Class of 2007 who does
not think of one or more St. Lawrence faculty members as mentors,
even friends, without whom what you have accomplished here might
not have been possible.
This same
Secretary Spellings is today engaged in an attempt to replace
the national system of voluntary peer-reviewed accreditation
where performance is measured against each college or university’s mission, goals and objectives, with
a one-size fits all federal government-constructed form of accreditation where
institutional assessment, as in “No Child Left Behind,” will be
based on standardized test results. How embarrassing that the idealistic,
inspiring, made-for- 21st century-work kind of liberal education I have been
describing might be driven out by the cafeteria-style, grab and go model advocated
by Secretary Spellings. If that happens, it will not only be disastrous
for the individuals deprived of such an education, it will also be the end
of U. S. global economic competitiveness.
I take your
time with this today because I want you to read the newspaper,
see for yourself what silliness is abroad in American today in
the area of higher education policy, and then add your voices—voices
made lucid and coherent, I am confident, by the liberal education
you have encountered at St. Lawrence. For
you are indeed a remarkable senior class—smart, articulate,
diverse, ready to make an impact. You have proven that to us
over and over in your time here. Now show it to the world! Especially
show it to Secretary Spellings.
We are going to miss you, the
great class of 2007, very, very much. My wish for you
is that throughout your life you will think of St. Lawrence as
your second home, 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. Thank you!
Peter
D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., “How Should Colleges
Prepare Students to Succeed in Today’s Global Economy?” Conducted
on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities,
December 28, 2006.
