Penultimate Draft Remarks of Welcome/State
of the University
Opening Convocation—August 31, 2006
Daniel F. Sullivan, President
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 later
in the program. This is an exhilarating, exciting time of
the year for me and, I hope, you as well. It is also the beginning
of our fourth half-century as a university, our sesquicentennial
year now complete—and what a year it was, as I’ll summarize
in a moment.
Before I
do that I want to talk a bit more about the recent Spellings Commission
report. As
you know, I shared three of my specific responses—on what sort of higher
education we should seek to provide students for the 21st century, on science
and mathematics education, and on access and affordability—with you by
e-mail a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t read the whole report
you should, because I believe it lays out both the public and the public policy
climate for higher education in America just now better than any single thing
you could read. Recall for a moment the report’s summary judgment: “.
. . . . . today that world is becoming tougher, more competitive, less
forgiving of wasted resources and squandered opportunities. In tomorrow’s
world a nation’s wealth will derive from its capacity to educate, attract,
and retain citizens who are able to work smarter and learn faster—making
educational achievement ever more important both for individuals and for society
writ large. . . . . . American higher education has become what, in the business
world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times
self-satisfied, and unduly expensive.”
In some
respects I believe this critique of American higher education is
on the mark. As
I said in my matriculation remarks on Monday agreeing with Thomas Friedman’s
assessment, Americans—and
very importantly America’s youth—do not feel the sense of urgency
about higher education outcomes necessary to ensure America’s continued
strength in the world economy. Bright young people in the developing
world are hungry for success, whereas U.S. college students and graduates more
and more exhibit the lack of motivation and drive that often accompanies affluence. The
Spellings Report focuses on what it sees as an inflexible system of American
higher education; Friedman worries about lack of motivation among large numbers
of American students. Taken together, if true, those are big worries.
Where
that leads the Spellings Commission, however, is straight into the
trap Friedman’s
book avoids when, in its later chapters, he takes up the question of what are
the barriers to the unfettered operation of the free market that we should
choose to impose to preserve our basic humanity. Recall from my Monday
remarks his extensive quoting from his visit with Michael Sandel, who re-introduced
him to that key passage from Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto: Sandel
told him that “a flat, frictionless world is a mixed blessing. . . .
. From the first stirrings of capitalism, people have imagined the possibility
of the world as a perfect market—unimpeded by protectionist pressures,
disparate legal systems, cultural and linguistic differences, or ideological
disagreement. But this vision has always bumped up against the world
as it actually is—full of sources of friction and inefficiency. Some
obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste and lost
opportunities. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits,
cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect
non-market values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride.
. . . That is why the debate about capitalism has been, from the very
beginning, about which frictions, barriers, and boundaries are mere sources
of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging
that we should try to protect.”
The
kind of higher education the Spellings Commission advocates is one
that is closely tailored to educating labor for a free global market. A successful
system of higher education in this model is highly flexible and responsive,
adapting quickly what is taught and learned to the changing needs of the moment
in the world economy. Workers must be prepared throughout their lifetimes
to keep going back for more education to ready them for the next thing the
economy needs them to do, and so higher education must develop the capacities
necessary to educate older students in response to the narrow needs they have
for preparation for the next job. The cafeteria and “grab and go” metaphors
I used in my response to Spellings, borrowed from Carol Schneider’s letter
to the Spellings Commission on behalf of the Association of American Colleges
and Universities (AAC&U)—Carol is president of AAC&U—fit
here, it seems to me.
But this
kind of education does not prepare students to consider what barriers
should exist to the operation of the free market, questions like: what is a
life worth living, what is a just society and how can it be created and maintained,
how can people learn to live in peace with each other, and how should the world
economy’s fruits be shared so that the least able and fortunate among
us can also live a decent life? The profound warning in Friedman’s
book—his clarion call for liberal education as I see it—is that
in a flattening world people become preoccupied with responding to the market
and in their haste to keep up, to compete, do not provide for the kind of education
necessary to ensure that life has meaning.
That is
the greatest danger if the Spellings Commission report is taken seriously. That
it could be written at all as the statement of the current federal government
on higher education should send chills up the spines of all of us. But
rest assured, the reasoning embodied in that report is what is driving decreasing
state support for higher education nationally, and that decreasing support
is either supported or tolerated by growing numbers of Americans because they
agree with the report’s conclusion that we are risk-averse, self-satisfied,
and too expensive. Our—and I mean especially the nation’s
selective liberal arts colleges—resistance to total capitulation to the
requirements of the global free market being produced by the flattening world
is seen as mere risk-aversion and self-satisfaction for the purpose of preserving
our high prices and relatively comfortable lives.
What we
must do in response, I believe, is clear: we must commit the necessary
time and energy to sustain that of what we do that we know works to help students
achieve an excellent liberal education; we must be about the business of continuous
innovation, curiosity, and commitment to finding ways to affect our students
more deeply and efficiently; we must constantly be testing and questioning
our understanding of what it is important to teach and to know; we must model,
to the extent that we can, in our own individual behavior and in our behavior
as a university a defensible vision of the good life and the good society so
that our students become thoughtful and self-reflective about those matters
as well; we must commit to sufficient assessment of what we do to ensure that
we never do become the self-satisfied kind of institution the Spellings Commission
thinks it sees everywhere in America; and we must take care to provide ourselves
the underlying resources necessary to sustain what we do over the long haul,
for there will never be a time when a liberal education is irrelevant, despite
what the Spellings Commission would have America believe.
Stated that
way, the stakes are very high for us. The Spellings Commission,
and much of America (though not, thankfully, a growing number of
high school graduates) believe we are a dinosaur. But for the
good of our students, the nation and the world, we must live on and
do so with increasing success. Our
work is a vocation, not a job. What we do is demanding, stressful,
challenging in the extreme, and we will never get the credit we deserve
for our commitment and, sadly, no matter how wealthy St. Lawrence
becomes we will never be able to pay you what you are really worth. I
hope and pray that all of us at St. Lawrence can find ways to choose
idealism over cynicism in the face of our challenges—that complacency
and inflexibility will never be our choice. The stakes are
enormous.
I wish I had the power to change the environment in which
we must function. Though I do commit a fair amount of energy
to it, the going is tough. But we do have
a great deal of control over what happens here at St. Lawrence, and
for that our society and we ourselves will hold us accountable.
So
how are we doing? What is the state of the University today? I
spoke about this at length in a packed chapel during reunion—a
kind of sesquicentennial state of the University—and those
remarks are available to you linked from the president’s page
on our website. I won’t repeat it all for you now, but
here is just a peek. I looked at educational outcomes, students,
and our financial strength and adequacy of physical assets.
- Educational outcomes: What is our mission
and what are our educational goals? What evidence do we have
that we are accomplishing them? Do we have any evidence that
we are accomplishing them any better than other colleges? Do
we have the faculty resources to deliver a liberal education of
real excellence? My response in June, with a few caveats,
was that we are seeing in the wonderful assessment work led by
Kim Mooney, Christine Zimmerman, Carol Bate and many others, strong
and improving educational outcomes. There are too many to
summarize here, but you should all take satisfaction in them. If
I have worries, they are in areas where Grant already has groups
of faculty and staff working: advising, rhetoric and communication,
and civic engagement come to mind. In the face of our very
demanding work here, we simply must also find the time and energy
to innovate and to use results from our assessment work in order
to get better.
- Students: Are we attracting to St. Lawrence
students ready, through academic preparation and personal motivation
and commitment, to take optimal advantage of what we have to offer? Are
we in demand? Do great students want to come here to study? How
do we compare in these regards to other selective liberal arts
colleges?
- The students admitted for the class that matriculated this week
were selected from an all-time high 3192 applicants,
of whom 59% were accepted for admission.
- 658 accepted students deposited, for an overall yield of 35%. 23%
of the class was accepted early decision. 614 arrived here
for matriculation on Monday, and Terry Cowdrey summarized their
qualities for you in the way only she can.
Our students are getting stronger, more serious of purpose, and
more diverse. That diversity, we know from research, brings
additional educational gains for our students. And we are one
of a small number of selective liberal arts colleges that enrolls
a truly diverse student body socio-economically: last year
18% of St. Lawrence students were recipients of federal Pell Grants—grants
that go to students from families with incomes in the lowest quartile
in America. This contrasts with 4% at Washington and Lee, 7%
at Davidson, 9% at Colby, 9% at Bates, 9% at Middlebury, 10% at Colgate,
and so on. In
America today students from the highest family income quartile but
the lowest academic ability and high school performance quartile
have the same probability of attending and completing college as
students from the highest ability and high school performance quartile
and the lowest family-income quartile. This degree of inequality
of access to higher education is a national disgrace; our wealthier
liberal arts college competitors are contributing to that national
disgrace; our goal at St. Lawrence, as it has been throughout our
history, is to be—as one alumnus from the Class of 1956 said
at our home during reunion—the university of opportunity.
We
struggle mightily, of course, with this issue despite our clear commitment. We
manage to enroll many more low-income students than our competitors,
but our graduates leave St. Lawrence with a very high average level
of student loan debt—the fifth highest
average student loan debt of any national liberal arts college. This
is a major strategic issue for the agenda of the fall meeting of
the Board of Trustees—how to continue to have high socio-economic
diversity on campus, which translates into a very high financial
aid budget relative to our competitors, while somehow addressing
our students’ indebtedness. I hope we have some good
answers by then.
Our students are not perfect, of course. If they were, why
would they need us! What they are is truly worthy of the effort
we and they put into the project of their education in the liberal
arts, into the launching of their lives of learning.
- Financial strength and adequacy of physical assets: Do
we have the financial strength and physical assets to deliver the
kind of education our mission and goals envisage? How have
we changed in these regards in the last decade? How do we
compare to other selective liberal arts colleges?
There
is no sense denying to this group that a decade ago St. Lawrence
was losing ground financially and in its facilities in comparison
to other top liberal arts colleges. We were a turnaround project. Today,
we are back, fueled by a resource base that is increasingly strong
but never to be taken for granted, confident that we can achieve
great things with and for our students:
- Our endowment stands today at about $230 million, fully recovered
and significantly ahead of where it was prior to the recession
of 2000. Income from our endowment is absolutely critical
to our ability to provide our students what they need.
- We have moved from being in the bottom quartile in annual total
cash fund raising results relative to our comparison group to well
above the median and heading toward the top quartile. Last
year we achieved our very best fund raising year ever, with cash
gifts of almost $22.6 million. Having completed Campaign
St. Lawrence on December 31 of 2002 with a final gift total of
$132 million, we were hard at work on the quiet phase of our next
campaign on January 1, 2003. We will go public with this
new campaign in October. Gifts and pledges totaling $80 million
have been received in the quiet phase, with trustee gift commitments
of $45 million toward the $50 million goal they have set for themselves. St.
Lawrence alumni, parents and friends have been unbelievably generous
to this place, motivated by the desire to ensure that the magic
we make with our students today can continue long into the future. I
am very confident of our ability to keep our fund raising effort
and results at a very high level going forward.
- On the facilities front, when the Johnson Hall of Science is
completed in the summer of 2007, we will have invested $180 million
in facilities and technology in a decade. The campus has
been transformed in every area, from academic facilities to residential
facilities to facilities essential for our co-curricular and extra-curricular
programs. That work is not yet done—we have 1.8 million
square feet of space on 1,000 acres, and in my nightmares grass
is growing everywhere out of control, tent caterpillars are eating
all of the leaves on our trees and dropping on my remarks at outdoor
commencements, and the buildings are always unpainted and roofs
leaking—but St. Lawrence University, here in Canton, New
York, is now a destination for great students who want to experience
that very special culture that is St. Lawrence, that culture that
you are here today getting ready to provide for our students again.
I think you can see that we have accomplished a very great deal
together, even as we understand that we have a great deal more to
do. I’m going to be doing all I can this year to get
the good news about St. Lawrence out to the wider world. I
do so with real excitement about our present and future, and with
great pleasure that we are in this wonderful work together.
One piece of very good news in this regard is that in this year’s U.
S. News and World Report college rankings we have moved up to
57 from last year’s rank of 61 among national liberal arts
colleges. While we all know that U. S. News and World Report is
mostly measuring inputs rather than outcomes, that improvement is
nonetheless another indication that our admissions selectivity, reputation
and resources are moving in the right direction in relation to our
competition. Bravo to all of you for what you do to make all
of this happen!
Please remember that Ann and I are hosting a reception 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!
Thomas
L. Friedman,
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
Data
are for 2003 as reported by Tom Mortensen in Postsecondary
Opportunity, February 2006. In that year 21% of St.
Lawrence students received Pell Grants.
