Convocation 2007
Daniel F. Sullivan

Welcome back to continuing faculty and staff, and a warm and heartfelt welcome to our new faculty and staff, who will be introduced to us by Val later in the program.  These are exciting and challenging times for St. Lawrence, but I never tire of our challenges—this is the best work there is and for me this is the best place I know to do it.  You make it that way, and for that I am very grateful.

I’ve got a lot to share with you today, so I’m going to get right to it.  Let me take just a few moments to remind us of some highlights of last year that make going into this year so very exciting, and then I want to lay out some of our agenda for the year and how I think we need to tackle it.

Highlights
            So, first, a few highlights among many:

• We had, of course, all-time best years in admissions applications (4,645) and cash fund raising results ($22.9 million).
• Keeping with a recent trend toward greater competitiveness on the part of our students for national fellowships and other honors, Jon Cardinal and Charlotta Chung were our first ever Truman Scholars.
• Six new books written by St. Lawrence faculty were published; Professor of Anthropology Alice Pomponio was named a Fulbright Scholar; Associate Professor of English Robert Cowser Jr. was awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) to allow him to work on an upcoming book; Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures Steven F. White was selected for a Fulbright Senior Specialists project.
• St. Lawrence hosted two major conferences on Asia: the New York Conference on Asian Studies and the 2007 Political Economy of the World System (PEWS) Conference; and the University celebrated the 20th anniversary of the First-Year Program with a national conference on the topic.
• Our undergraduate and graduate teacher education programs have been accredited for another five years by TEAC, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council.
• And, of course, our own Professor of Gender Studies and Government Val Lehr replaced Grant Cornwell as Vice President of the University and Dean of Academic Affairs this summer, and she is up to speed and on the move.  [Grant told me in an e-mail the other day, by the way, that whenever the president of the College of Wooster encounters the famed 180 piece Wooster Fighting Scots Marching Band, they stop what their doing and immediately play “Hail to the Chief!”]
• Finally, late in the spring the faculty passed the most major revision to our shared governance committee system in a very long time—a revision which, in the greatest part, I very much supported—and mention of it provides the transition to a discussion of our agenda for this year.

Our Agenda
            One important change is that the new committee structure creates for the first time a place for the discussion of the formation of institutional strategy among on-campus stakeholders.  The old University committee structure had a place for almost any issue, but no specific place where the large issues of institutional strategy could be raised and vetted, and where the results of our robust program of assessment could be converted into institutional self-reflection and strategy development.  In the new committee system there is now an Institutional Strategy and Assessment Committee where the President, an ex officio member, as well as other members of our community can bring questions of institutional strategy for discussion and advice.  My hunch, yet to be tested since this committee will first be in operation this fall, is that the opportunity to discuss and influence the most important institutional questions that shape the context for all else will heighten the interest in shared governance among all University stakeholders.  In my view the real decisions to be made are frequently ones of strategy from which many other decisions follow.  If you’re not involved in strategy formation, it’s too late to get your oar in later in the process.  I believe that faculty, in particular, but also staff and students should play a central role in strategy formation, so I am delighted by this change.  I plan very aggressive use of this forum right from its first meeting next week to help us have the important strategic conversations we need to have at this critical point in the University’s history. 

            Each year I have prepared a set of goals and objectives for confidential discussion with the Board of Trustees at their Canaras summer retreat.  This year I have drafted my goals and objectives as a public document—at least within our shared governance environment on campus—and not just a private communication with trustees (for performance evaluation purposes) and senior staff.  It is my hope going forward that my goals and objectives will be the starting point for the new committee on Institutional Strategy and Assessment, inviting the members of that committee into deliberations about what I consider to be the most important strategic issues facing the University and its leadership.

            The document itself is long and comprehensive, so I won’t give it to you in its entirety today.  It is also ambitious, signaling very clearly that even as we anticipate a presidential transition in two years, there isn’t going to be any slowing down at St. Lawrence—any loss of the forward momentum we’ve established.  Here, then, are some of the strategic issues and priorities on which I believe I we should concentrate in the coming year: 

• In the last decade our job was in many ways a turnaround project.  The question was straightforward:  could we return St. Lawrence to the ranks of the best liberal arts colleges in America?  Well, together we have done that.  Our resource base has grown substantially both absolutely and relative to our comparison group; demand on the part of prospective students is skyrocketing; our increasingly sophisticated assessments of student learning outcomes show strong results; and students, alumni, and parents of St. Lawrence students are enthusiastic and pleased about what is going on here.  And yet there is not surprisingly no lessening of the tension we all feel from the competing demands on our resources and our time—from finding the resources to provide more competitive faculty and staff salaries to finding ways to address faculty workload issues to our priorities for facilities enhancements and the amount of capital we are able to allocate to this priority to finding additional resources for enhanced environmental sustainability initiatives to having insufficient funds to continue existing program enhancements and to start new initiatives to providing student financial aid at a level that will result in lower student loan debt at graduation to our need to balance the operating budget.  Despite our absolute and our relative improvement, we still can’t afford to compete with institutions like Williams, Middlebury, Colgate and Hamilton head-to-head on faculty and staff salaries, generosity of our student aid packages, funds allocated for maintenance and enhancement of our facilities, academic and co-curricular program enrichment, providing students with paid opportunities to do research with faculty or take an internship, or study abroad—all at the same time and to the same degree.  Those institutions have in some cases six times our endowment and far less commitment to educating low-income students, which means that their net revenue per student is considerably higher.  At the same time, we must get more competitive in all of those ways and others if we are, ultimately, to do right by our students.

The good news is that we are very much in the hunt—we are competing well with the right colleges and universities again.  We feel great about that.  But we also can see more clearly just how strong our competition is, and so there is no resting, no pausing for refreshment, just continued anxiety about the future, and about how to continue to get better faster than the competition at all the things that matter the most in the education of our students.

My first and most important goal for 2007-08, I believe, must therefore be to work with the new Institutional Strategy and Assessment Committee, and with the Board of Trustees in parallel, while keeping in close consultation with Faculty Council at the same time, to seek and find an optimization among the investments we must make to try meet competing needs—an optimization that will allow us both to continue to get better faster than our top competition in all of the ways that matter most to the education of our students while at the same time we ensure the continued commitment of our multiple stakeholders.  In particular we need to take seriously what we are hearing from faculty about the things that limit their ability to do their important work in the best possible way, including what the market is telling us about our ability to compete to hire and keep great faculty. 

While continuing to exercise strong budget discipline will be important for St. Lawrence for many years to come—really forever—an optimization that has a chance to accomplish my first goal is only possible if we continue to improve our resource base relative to our competition.  Presently, all three of our primary revenue sources—net student revenue, endowment income, and gifts for current spending—are growing strongly.  They must continue to do so.

• With regard to net student revenue, our overall enrollment is back to where it was in the early 1990’s; retention continues to improve (the four-year graduation rate for the Class of 2007, just graduated, was 77% (up from 72% for the Class of 2006), and perhaps will reach 78% or 79% at the end of 6 years; and financial aid discount continues to fall (though more slowly than in our plan) even as we are maintaining a healthy socioeconomic diversity.  We must continue our very strong admissions and retention results going forward.  Applications must continue to grow, and retention must continue to improve to the point where we are once again, as we were in the 1970’s and 1980’s, graduating more than 80% of our students in four years.  This must be an ongoing, very high priority for the president.

Ten percent of the first year class are U.S. students of color, down from 12% last year.  Our lack of progress in this area was disappointing but not surprising—we wanted to fill the Director of Multicultural Recruitment position with a person who had considerable experience and expertise in this area and were not able to do so until this summer.  That position is now filled with a person we believe is an outstanding hire.  In this coming year we must get back on track with regard to the diversity of the incoming class, and I must give both leadership and support so that this can happen.

On a positive note, 5% of the Class of 2011 is international students, up from 4% last year.

We also saw this year a major swing in the gender of the class to enter St. Lawrence in the fall.  60% of incoming first-year students are women, when we have been very close to gender balance in our student body for a very long time.  We will want to understand how this happened and make any changes we believe are necessary as we plan for recruitment of our next class.  I think you know that, nationally, women are going on to college at higher rates than men.  This year’s first-year class gender ratio may therefore recur for us for some time.

In short, I need to continue to give personal leadership and attention to improving admissions recruitment results in all ways necessary for institutional success, recognizing that I work with one of the best admissions leaders and one of the best admissions and financial aid staffs anywhere in America.

• Ongoing modifications of our endowment investment strategy continue to pay dividends in stronger endowment total return, both absolutely and relative to other like endowments—total return for last year was 19.8% net of management fees—and Campaign Momentum St. Lawrence is producing a healthy level of new gifts to endowment—over $6 million this past year.  While I have little influence over our endowment investing, that being primarily a trustee responsibility, I do have an effect on our fund-raising for endowment.  This must continue to be a high priority for the president as well.
  
• Finally, with regard to revenue, 2005-06 was our very best cash fund-raising year ever by a large margin, and we exceeded that all-time record in 2006-07, raising $22.9 million in total cash gift income.  By our June 30 fiscal year end, Campaign Momentum St. Lawrence had moved past $105.5 million in gifts and pledges toward our $200 million total goal, and trustees have achieved their goal by giving and pledging over $50 million (though their total will continue to rise).  But institutional financial plans succeed or fail on the basis of cash and the timing of its flow.  Specifically, working with our outstanding advancement leadership and staff I must give personal leadership and attention to meeting a bold and ambitious University advancement agenda both in fund raising and in communications:
• We must continue to raise between $20-$30 million in cash gifts to St. Lawrence each year going forward. 
• This is more of a wish than a goal, but I greatly hope that we can take advantage of our powerful fund raising momentum to outperform with respect to our campaign completion timetable and reach our $200 million campaign goal before the scheduled December 30, 2010 completion date.  If this were to happen, what a tremendous boost it would give the University in a time of leadership transition. 
• And I will work to continue to implement a communication strategy that succeeds in creating both understanding and motivation to help among the University’s key on-campus and off-campus constituencies.

Revenue enhancement must therefore be a very high priority for the University.  At the same time, because of the principle of cumulative advantage, St. Lawrence will likely never achieve par with its top liberal arts college competition in terms of financial resources.  The reality of it is that we will always be battling from behind. 

5.   Another priority for me is to give personal leadership and support to Val Lehr as she tackles the challenging first year of her academic deanship.  For example, the optimization I outlined earlier involves sorting through to a better place several matters central to strengthening the faculty and academic program, including development of a strategy for dealing with faculty workload issues.  Specifically, I will work with Val and inevitably also Faculty Council on the following:

• Analyze why more associate professors do not stand for promotion to full professor and develop appropriate strategies for encouraging them to do so or supporting them in getting prepared to do so.
• Analyze the situation thoroughly and, working with Faculty Council, develop a plan for addressing faculty workload, and workload reallocation, issues.
• Continue to make progress in the assessment of student learning and devise, again with help from Faculty Council, an appropriate linkage between our assessment efforts in this area and the work of the faculty’s Academic Affairs Committee.
• Support Val’s efforts, working with Margaret Kent Bass, to get our new Center for Diversity and Social Justice off the ground and running.
• Work with Val and Faculty Council to complete and gain acceptance for a plan to use our endowments for cultural events, visiting lectures and residencies in a more coordinated, strategic way, in line with recommendations of the 2004 Cultural Affairs Committee report.
• Work with faculty in the sciences and mathematics to describe both a vision and a plan of action for science and mathematics education at St. Lawrence that will be competitive for a grant in the latest round of Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant funding competition.
• Support Val's efforts to think anew about general education at St. Lawrence and take seriously the critique and recommendations in our Middle States Self-Study regarding our University missions, goals and objectives statements, while connecting these discussions to both external conversations, such as AAC&U's LEAP initiative and on-campus initiatives, such as the conversations that will be part of our Core Commitments grant work. The Core Commitments conversations will focus on the concepts of ethical responsibility, social justice, and multicultural democracy and their meaning for liberal education. Since they will involve faculty, staff, and students, they can provide important thinking for the faculty and trustees to draw upon to modify the curriculum.

In addition to these issues and priorities, my goals and objectives document also addresses fiscal strategy and management, our facilities enhancement program, IT (with Grant’s departure to Wooster, IT once again reports to me), student life, intercollegiate athletics, our chaplaincy program, assessment and institutional research, the Canton Initiative, diversity, community building on campus, and leadership off campus, all in considerable detail.  Those issues and priorities are also extremely important but impossible to go into here. 

As I indicated earlier, the entire goals and objectives document will be shared with Faculty Council and the Institutional Strategy and Assessment Committee to begin the conversations we need to have in order to locate an optimum strategy for going forward.  I truly hope that together we can find our way to the same page with regard to institutional priorities.  It will take work, for the issues are complex and the trade-offs difficult, but I believe we can do it.
Finally, I need to make mention of a very important event that will be happening this year, and that is the site visit in February, beginning the Sunday after our winter board meeting, of the visiting team from Middle States as part of our decennial accreditation process.  The visiting team chair, John Fry, President of Franklin and Marshall College, will be making his preliminary visit on October 4 and 5 to assess our readiness for the February site visit and to work out organizational details with us.  Under the leadership of Kim Mooney and our Middle States Steering Committee, our draft self-study is moving forward nicely.  An earlier, very good draft was discussed and critiqued at our June Canaras Board retreat with many members of the Steering Committee present.  Kim, Mary Hussman and many others have spent the summer revising and improving the self-study draft, and I have reviewed each revised chapter in detail.  It is a candid, deeply thoughtful assessment of where St. Lawrence is just now, and it includes many useful and timely recommendations on how we can get even better.  We owe these colleagues a deep debt of gratitude for their fine work on this.

It is now time to orchestrate an extensive set of opportunities for public review and comment on the self-study by faculty, staff and students.  I hope we can imagine four faculty and four administrative staff sessions each devoted to two self-study chapters (much like we did with the Board at Canaras), with the self-study available on the web for people to review ahead of the sessions in order to prepare questions, followed in the case of faculty by a full faculty meeting prior to the October Board meeting at which the self-study is discussed and the faculty hopefully pass a resolution something like:  “The faculty of St. Lawrence University has reviewed and discussed our 2007 Middle States re-accreditation self-study and believe it is on the whole a fair and accurate representation of the state of the University.”  We will want Thelmo to organize some student vetting as well.  We will then devote the Friday strategic issues session of the October Board meeting to a second trustee review of the self-study and hopefully get a resolution from trustees in their Saturday meeting similar to that of the faculty’s. 

The presence in the same year of our first attempt to make an Institutional Strategy and Assessment Committee work and the thorough and open vetting on campus of our Middle States Self-Study will be very good for strategy setting at St. Lawrence.  The openness is the easy part, of course.  That is part of the culture here.  Getting to smart solutions for institutional strategy will be much harder.  But if good process is important for that, we will I am sure get to a very good place.

You’ve been very patient with me today.  I hope you are as excited as I am about getting on with the good work we have before us.  Larry Winston, our Board chair, asked me specifically to convey his and the Board’s appreciation for all you do to make this place as good as it is and to help it become even better.  Working together, all of us really make a great team.

Finally, please remember that Ann and I are hosting a reception for current and retired faculty, administrative staff, spouses, significant others and partners at MacAllaster House at the completion of this convocation.  I’d be delighted to engage you informally on any of these issues there, or you can just reconnect with friends and colleagues as we start up this great work again together.  Thank you!