REMARKS OF WELCOME TO FACULTY AND STAFF
CONVOCATION CEREMONY

Beginning Again
William L. Fox – Wednesday, August 26, 2009

I begin again as a student at St. Lawrence. In recent summer weeks, I have also become a student of  St. Lawrence. I have studied hard and taken long walks, which, by nature, I will continue to do even as the rusticators return from travel and thinking; as the fallow campus becomes a crop. I am not here to retell the long journey from the 1970s, but to report from the new field of my life and work what I am learning.
First things first, as our teachers always admonish.  I express to you, even as the early days add up and speed up, the extraordinary honor of returning to St. Lawrence at such a time of accomplishment and promise. The men and women who are the alumni/ae of St. Lawrence will seldom equivocate in giving their full and consistent testament to the excellence of their student experience.  We’ve been very good for a very long time. But I hasten to note also, how much better St. Lawrence has gotten during my time away.

Your personal example, witness, and involvement in establishing St. Lawrence’s habits of creativity, diversity, and engaged learning have brought the university to the better place of our best hopes. Thank you for the fire of your imagination. I am also immensely grateful to my predecessor, Dan Sullivan, and to the Board of Trustees who have, as you can see for yourselves, poured themselves into this work like the molten steel giving the new buildings their framework and beauty. My gratitude yields to humility and it leads to the obvious first lesson in joining the St. Lawrence community—I still have much to learn. You will be, as your faculty predecessors were in another day, my teachers. And my co-workers with staff responsibilities will also instruct, inform, and debate as teachers I value.

When Robert Frost turned 50, he realized that the old were no longer his teachers. Rather, the young had suddenly gained the primacy of his learning new things. Many of us have crossed that boundary, though some refuse to show their passports and risk trespass or being left behind. I think our students, recent graduates, and new faculty have much to tell us. And I will be an eager listener because I bear an obligation to ask again and again, what constitutes a superb college education? How can we best help this generation get ready for their lives? What capacities—a good term that I note has been recently introduced to the St. Lawrence nomenclature of curricular goals and purposes—for developing leadership do we owe our students as a common experience? What breadth of learning will be most essential in the 21st century? What are the most powerful, profound, and effective moments that we want our students to know and share?

I have been posing these questions in my conversations all throughout the summer. These are the questions that abide and will inform our long conversation that will sustain and shape our plans and the measures of our progress. As we begin again a new academic year, I wish to offer a few preliminary findings that will mostly affirm, restore, and renew the work at hand.
While the sampling is still limited, a few themes emerge, nevertheless, in response to my first inquiries.

As I begin, growing numbers of alumni report to me that we should not underestimate the importance of a stronger self-confidence that a St. Lawrence education gave them. Tied to the skills of written expression and oral communication, we are also helping students learn to solve increasingly difficult problems, acquire the habits of informed, interesting conversation, and learn the incredibly important social art of civil negotiation. Behind, through, and beyond our courses in any semester, our students seem to be getting a great deal more than they knew was possible when they first entered.

As we begin again, I readily mention how often I am hearing from people around the country and on our campus that over the years and right now, the force and imprint of individual teachers is powerful and lasting. I know this about St. Lawrence in the closest personal terms. This is our secret formula, simultaneously invaluable and immeasurable. The intellectual inspiration that makes the sparks fly is not only about course titles, though that is usually the beginning point. It is also the thoughtful way we are maintaining relationships between people and among minds.

I frequently ask alumni of all ages if they can remember a particularly vivid campus personality or favorite teacher and tell me by name who it is. With St. Lawrence alumni, there is never any hesitation and there is always more than one name given to the answer of who changed individual lives. I was in a Park Avenue office this summer meeting a St. Lawrence alumnus for the first time, a person who in the business world would carry the honorific title “captain of…” I posed my test question and he instantaneously named two professors, outside his major, each in the humanities, who somehow affected his thinking for the rest of his life.

The Italian violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini often finished playing his most complicated sonatas after breaking all the strings, save one. It seems to me that no matter where our students go in the world or what they end up doing in it, often with spectacular brilliance, but sometimes with just a steady useful, competence in a small community, they each have one unbroken string that is always left to play—the influence of great teachers.

As we begin again, I am mindful that much of the St. Lawrence magic is about the capacity for friendship that is learned in our community, even at times defined by the quality Emerson said was essential, “let thy friend be to thee a beautiful enemy.” We need to help our students learn to accept and welcome criticism that does not ever exclude the possibilities of loyalty and friendship. If we do that for them, their education about friendship will be proven and firm. It is this particular Laurentian quality, originating in the classroom and campus that explains the frequency of alumni who tell me that when they are enduring the hard things of life or tasting the joys of triumphant living, they almost always turn first to their St. Lawrence friends.

I have offered a few observations about the general and qualitative state of things on the threshold of the new academic year. I have other things on my mind as we begin together the important work we are called to do. Historians regard Hypatia of Alexandria, an African woman, albeit Roman Africa, one of the great mathematical minds of a very large epoch. She lived in the late 4th century and died at the hands of a Christian mob. What words of hers survive, therefore, are all the more precious because she paid the ultimate price for her intellectual independence. She left us this thought: “The further we travel, the more truth we comprehend; to understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding the things that lie beyond.”

There is a curious paradox in this aphorism—the dual value of traveling and staying home. I have been reflecting on some discoveries from my random peregrinations this summer. And the several first-impression qualities I have reported to you are about relationships and the centrality of our community. These are the things on our doorstep that must prepare us to face some additional challenges on the other side of that door.

As we begin again, there is also at the door of the fall term the complex triune of adversity, uncertainty, and opportunity arriving on the high winds of a stormy economy. We have no choice but to face the facts, which are entirely open to any of you for viewing. In sum, here are the circumstances that mirror every college in America, but may still seem unfamiliar at St. Lawrence: we’re missing about $80 million we had this time a year ago (and that roughly means we will have about $4 million in lost operating revenue to think about); St. Lawrence has invested strategically and leveraged aggressively its resources to transform our campus in recent good times, but the debt is now a little over $100 million (which costs about $5 million a year in interest charges, just like our home mortgages); our fundraising has been spectacular, but we fell short more than $10 million this year compared to the prior year’s all-time record.

Meanwhile, forecasts call for only a modest return to economic growth, continuing high unemployment, more home foreclosures, increasing business failures, and caution about higher education spending by families shifting their priorities to a savings-orientation.  If we do nothing or only do little, the resulting deficits over the next five years will be crippling and very difficult to fund because of our fixed obligations to creditors. First, the collar gets tighter, then the belt. I can’t and won’t sugarcoat the truth of our situation.
We will make haste slowly in how we address these new pressures. Our budgets are not turned on a dime nor can they be reduced to a dime. Rather, it will take us a couple of years to bring ourselves into a state of healthy and secure financial equilibrium. Every one of us will have an opportunity, a fresh opportunity, to learn and think with the spirit of creativity St. Lawrence has long been known by. Without invoking a revival of Manichean dualism, we are not walking in some black-and-white dichotomy between Doomsday and the Promised Land.  

Years ago, Jacques Barzun (The House of Intellect, reprinted pb, 2002, 264) asked, “is the proposed undertaking going to be difficult—or merely fatiguing? The difference between work and wearisome futility lies in that distinction.” In other words, the learning we have in front of us about living within our means, like all learning, must be difficult and demanding. It can and should actually energize us if our spirit is right; if not, it will merely fatigue people who wish to think or believe the worst.
Historically, colleges and universities need two things to create an opportunity to get better, and to do so often dramatically. They need adversity and they need time. And that is why I am confident we can do something difficult really well and be better for it. We cannot stand still with the problem of the meanwhile and we cannot stand still with the occasion to think, even now, about St. Lawrence in the year 2020 and beyond.

One of my favorite works by Ryszard Kapuscinski is his memoir about Africa called The Shadow of the Sun (2001). In his extensive travels, he met a man named Edu, a medical technician. The man explained the meaning of his name as an abbreviation for “education.” On the day he came into the world, the first school was opened in his village, thus the reason for the name. Kapuscinski writes, “in societies without a tradition of written history, names were used to affix in memory the more important events, long past or recent.” As we begin again, we are in solidarity with those who would name a child Edu. St. Lawrence, like the young people we are getting to know all over again, has its best years ahead of it. A St. Lawrence education has its ultimate value when we see in each of our students, not a unit of the budget, but a young woman or man named Edu. Welcome back.