Remarks of Welcome/State of the University
Opening Convocation—August 28, 2008
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 by Val later in the program.  It’s great to see you all here today.  These are exciting and challenging times for St. Lawrence—indeed, for all of American higher education—but I like our challenges.  In actuality, we have worked very hard to have just this set of challenges.  I am anxious, as I know you are, to get after them!

One important difference this year, of course, is that because we are embarked on a presidential transition this is my last opening convocation.  The opportunity to talk with you about goals for the year and an agenda for the future is one of the things I will miss.  You bring such an optimism and a vision for this place to your work every day.  Thank you all for that.

I want, as usual, to begin with some end-of-last-year highlights.  Next I will urge you to take a close look at an analysis I did recently of some results we just received from the National Survey of Student Engagement—results that I shared with you in a memo a few days ago that show how far we have come in the last decade in our implementation of best practices in liberal education and how competitive we now are with the very best liberal arts colleges in America.  These results make me very proud, and I believe they will make you very proud.  They come from your hard and very smart work.  Finally, I will talk a bit about the agenda of presidential goals and objectives I believe is appropriate in this presidential transition year.  It is an agenda thoroughly vetted and discussed with the Board of Trustees at Canaras in June, and it is the agenda with which we will begin our discussions in the Institutional Strategy and Assessment Committee in the next weeks. 

Highlights
            So, first, a few highlights:

• Last year at opening convocation I reported for the second year in a row that we had all-time best years in admissions applications (4,645) and cash fund raising results ($22.9 million).  Well, this is the third year in a row I will report such all-time best results. 
• Admissions applications increased another 17% last year, to 5,418—in the top 10% of application increase percentages among our competitors—and Early Decision applications also grew 17%, to 245, our highest number in recent memory.  Our two-year compound application increase percentage was 70%.  With the admission of a small number of students from our wait list, our final acceptance percentage this year was 34% for a 25 percentage point decline over three years—a remarkable change.  Students admitted through our Early Decision Program make up 33% of the new class compared to 25% last year.  Overall, our “yield”—the percentage of acceptances that have enrolled—remained steady at 34%. 

In a year when access to loan capital by our students and their families has been uncertain, which caused us to expect higher-than-normal summer melt and higher-than-normal attrition among upperclassmen, summer melt was lower than our average of recent years and upperclass retention remained strong.  Our residence halls are, as a consequence, very full.  Joe Tolliver and his staff have been wonderful at working with students and parents to facilitate the smoothest-possible transition for them under the circumstances.

An indicator that I monitor very closely, of course, is our success in attracting children of alumni (we call them “chips”).  Our incoming class has about the same number of “chips” in it as last year’s all-time record on a slightly smaller base, so the percentage—about 9% of the class—is slightly up.  We monitor interest in St. Lawrence by alumni children so closely not because we assume that all children of alumni should come to St. Lawrence—though that would be interesting—but because these are applications coming from families who know us intimately.  When we are growing warts, they know that, and when we are developing more and more patches of beauty, they know that also.  If we ever see declining interest on the part of children of alumni—and we did see such a decline in the early 1990’s—that is like the miner’s canary. 

So this is all very good news, as is the news about class quality.  As you know, St. Lawrence has been “standardized test optional” for three years.  Very significantly, the percentage of first-year students ranking in the top 10% of their high school class increased to 45% from 35% a year ago—a very exciting change because high school academic performance remains the single best predictor of academic performance in college.  I’ll stop there because I know you learned a great deal about the incoming class from Terry Cowdrey’s remarks on Monday at matriculation, but I did want to celebrate these results with you today.

• Cash fund-raising results also reached an all-time high for the third year in a row.  Total cash gifts for the year ending June 30 were $23,885,000, up almost $1 million, or 4.3% over last year.  Campaign Momentum St. Lawrence grew closer to its $200 million goal by $32.8 million in gifts and pledges, and stood at $137.8 million at the end of June.  The St. Lawrence Fund, made up of gifts intended for spending on University operations, met its $5,325,000 goal, a 5.2% increase over last year’s total.  Alumni participation crept up a point to 36%.  In a very exciting result our Parents’ Fund grew a whopping 24.4% to $881,531.  We have the second or third largest level of parent giving in our comparison group—a major signal of parent satisfaction with the experience their sons and daughters are having here.  Given the state of the economy, we are very pleased with all of this.  Taken together, our admissions and fund-raising results are a powerful signal of how St. Lawrence is viewed today by its most important external constituencies.
• Important news on our endowment market value in the face of the current recession is that we experienced a decline of only 5% in our investment portfolio last year—to $245 million—while investors in general saw their investments experience declines 10+ percentage points higher and more.  It was a very fine piece of work by our trustee Investment Committee for the year in the face of very difficult markets.
• Another highlight of the year was our decennial accreditation process, culminating in February with our Middle States Team visit and this past June by our full reaccreditation by Middle States.  You have all had access to the visiting team’s report and my institutional response, but let me remind you of where you can find it if you haven’t yet had a chance to review it.  Go to our University Website, click on “Assessment,” then “Middle States Accreditation,” and there you will see them.  I think the visiting team got us right, recognizing both the truly remarkable quality of this place and our extraordinary progress since our last accreditation, and also how aggressive we have had to be financially to make the investments necessary to accomplish what we did.  They were on campus immediately after a very difficult February Board meeting where we struggled to make some hard financial choices in the midst of the meltdown of the tax-exempt bond auction market and a looming recession.  In their report they asked us to write a letter to Middle States when things settled down for us financially.  In the time since we have completely restructured our debt portfolio with very advantageous interest rates and considerably reduced risk, balanced our 2007-08 operating budget, had another extraordinary admissions and fund-raising year, invested our endowment skillfully in a very difficult stock and bond market, and saw the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's upgrade St. Lawrence University's bond rating while Moody's reaffirmed its existing rating.  Credit-ratings, which reflect the relative financial strength of institutions, help determine their cost of borrowing and are therefore important measures of a university's financial health.  We plan to send our letter to Middle States this fall.  As Middle States visiting team reports go, ours was among the most positive I’ve seen in 22 years as a college president.  Everyone at St. Lawrence should be proud.
• At the May meeting of the Board, of course, a new faculty and administrative salary policy was passed, improving on what had been in place, and our three union contracts were also restructured at the University’s initiative to increase the wage commitments in them.  It was tough to get there, but I’m very glad we did.  St. Lawrence faculty and staff—administrative and hourly—deserve to be well-compensated.  I hope the University can continue to pay attention to this issue in the coming years.  It is critical to our future.

National Survey of Student Engagement
Let me now toss in a plug for the memo I shared with you a few days ago reporting on some exciting new assessment results from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, for short), developed a decade or so ago at the University of Indiana by a group looking for better ways to assess student learning in college.  Its premise was that, while direct measurements of student learning in college that could be compared reliably across time and institutions were still a ways off, one could still learn a great deal from a certain kind of proxy assessment. 

We know that college students learn and retain more, and achieve higher levels of competence in a whole series of intellectual and practical skills, when they more frequently experience what George Kuh of NSSE calls “high impact practices.”  We also know that one can reliably assess how frequently students experience high impact practices by asking them, and that the questions one needs in order to do so are pretty straightforward, which is not the case when one attempts to assess learning outcomes like “analytical thinking” directly.

St. Lawrence first administered NSSE to a representative sample of first-year students and seniors in 2002, and as my memo indicated we then administered it again in 2006 and 2008.  In addition to St. Lawrence, 14 of the 25 members of our New Comparison Group administered NSSE in 2008—Allegheny, Colby, Colgate, College of Holy Cross, Connecticut College, Denison, Drew, Gettysburg, Hamilton, Hobart and William Smith, Macalester, Middlebury, Muhlenberg and Vassar—and Christine Zimmerman was able to get NSSE to give us grouped data for these institutions for comparison purposes.  This is a representative group from the NCG.  The same percentage of 2008 NSSE-administering NCG members rank higher than St. Lawrence in U.S. News and World Report, for example, as is the case for the full group of 25.  Benchmarking against this group of NCG institutions is really benchmarking against some of the strongest liberal arts colleges in America and gives us a good sense of where we stack up.

We have always accepted the premise of NSSE—that assessing the frequency of high impact practices should be a good proxy for direct assessment until we become more adept at it—but we have never reported our results to you in comparison to NCG institutions before because, until 2008, an insufficient number of NCG institutions used NSSE to enable a reasonable benchmark comparison. 

What does NSSE seek to measure?  The NSSE reports which contain our results combine into five summary indices students’ responses to a large number of questions seeking information on high impact practices.  The five indices, described much more fully in my memo, are:

• Level of Academic Challenge
• Active and Collaborative Learning
• Student-Faculty Interaction
• Enriching Educational Experiences
• Supportive Campus Environment

So how did we do?  My memo gives the results in detail and, again, I urge you to read it.  Let me just say here that the St. Lawrence data show dramatic improvement over time and, relative to the comparison groups in the benchmarking section of the report, we are at least competitive with—and with regard to most measures are superior to—some of the best liberal arts colleges in America. 
These data also suggest that if we want to remain competitive, we must continue to invest in and work at sustaining the kind of learning environment that the NSSE indices describe.  I know you already get this.  Standing still isn’t an option for St. Lawrence.  Again, let me just say thank you to all involved in this work at St. Lawrence for helping us get this far!

My Agenda for the Coming Year
Finally, let me say just a few words about my agenda for the coming year.  In this presidential transition year I have tried to formulate an agenda with the transition in mind.  I believe we must, on the one hand, continue moving forward, keeping up our hard-won momentum so that no time is lost, no hitches happen in our stride, as the University changes top leadership.  On the other hand, we need to keep our ambitions under control and not overreach at a time when because of the leadership transition the University is at heightened risk.  We need to keep options open so that the special qualities my successor will bring to the St. Lawrence presidency will have room to operate.  He or she deserves the chance to take advantage of the inevitable new opportunities changed leadership will bring.  We must also be good stewards of the University’s human and other resources during this year so that my successor begins with the best base of strength possible.

There are three goals and objectives I want to highlight today.  The full text of my goals and objectives document will be shared with you when I provide it to ISAC shortly. 

• Sustainability.  The first one is sustainability.  Sustainability is a critical issue for us for two interrelated reasons.  I am a signatory, as you know, of the President’s Climate Control Commitment which commits St. Lawrence to pursuing climate neutrality with respect to carbon emissions on a specified timetable.  Our plan to achieve climate neutrality is in preparation and will be a major focus of discussion on campus this fall.  Each and every person and institution must, in my view, recognize the major threat to our planet of global climate change and clean up their own side of the street.  The need for intelligent, strategic action is urgent.  At the same time, very pragmatically, St. Lawrence’s geographic location means we are more vulnerable to what is happening to world energy prices than many other colleges and universities.  That very same location, of course, including the low population density in the North Country, gives us special opportunities to restructure our approach to energy production and use.  We have been studying options for heating and new co-generation capability involving local, renewable fuel sources for well over a year.  It is critical that we get to a much more sustainable University energy strategy.  This is a very important priority in my goals and objectives for the year.  I believe St. Lawrence must be a regional and national leader on this issue and in the last couple of months St. Lawrence was at the center of or mentioned in a number of print and radio stories about college and university sustainability commitments.
• Study abroad.  The second is study abroad.  We know that study abroad experiences are among the most high-impact things our students can do in furtherance of the kind of liberal education to which St. Lawrence is committed, and given a future of increasing global interdependence the study abroad opportunities we provide our students will only become more and more important.  It has long been a goal of ours to allow an increased percentage of our students the opportunity to study abroad.   Presently, some 40-45% of our students do so.

However, as the number of applications for admission to St. Lawrence has grown, so has the demand for study abroad opportunities—more than 60% of incoming students now say they want to study abroad on the survey they complete just as they arrive on campus, and in recent years that percentage has been a good indicator of the percentage who actually do seek to study abroad.  The only limiting factor is our capacity—administratively and financially—to offer more opportunities.

At the same time, of course, the cost of overseas travel has increased, the global political climate is constantly changing and the physical risks associated with travel and study abroad have increased, especially in some of the areas of the world about which we would most like our students to learn.  We are in the beginning stages of an extensive review and study of all of this with the goal of developing new and more flexible kinds of study abroad experiences for our students.  Val gave faculty and staff a “heads up” on our approach to this issue by e-mail a couple of weeks ago.  We need to make significant progress this year on our planning for the future of overseas study at St. Lawrence.

• Facilities Enhancement Program.  Third, I need to ensure that this year we get to the next place in planning for our facilities enhancement program.  During this past year we worked through an especially difficult optimization of our finances to allow key priorities in several areas of the University to move forward.  We found funding and made other funding available to ensure that Phase 3a of the arts project, Phase 1 of the Pub project, and Phase 1 of the Bewkes renovation could move forward, though getting the construction bids to fit within our budget has been a big challenge this summer.  We also found resources to ensure an annual capital budget for this year (and hopefully next) of at least $8 million.  My efforts and the efforts of others to locate additional gifts to move current projects to a more solid place financially and to make possible, hopefully, a continuation of our multi-phase arts and sciences projects will continue at a high level this year. 

At the same time, a new facilities planning process, which should extend well into the first year of my successor’s term, and that looks out at the next 5-7 years must also begin this year so that our comprehensive facilities data base can be updated and a process for identifying new needs and wants can start.  The idea here is that as my successor is coming on board, he or she will be able to intersect with this process and continue it in 2009-10.  We will also need later this year to assess how Campaign Momentum St. Lawrence is doing and what the prospects for additional major facilities funding might be in a 5-7 year time frame.  And hopefully, whatever facilities enhancement program is approved will continue our growing emphasis on sustainability and LEED certification.  We now have just about 2 million square feet of facilities on the St. Lawrence campus—paying attention to their maintenance, their energy efficiency, their continuing appropriateness for our programs is work that will just never be done.

Conclusion
You’ve been very patient with me today.  Thank you for that.  I hope you are as excited as I am about getting on with the good work we have before us.  Don Rose, 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!

A current, highly exciting AAC&U project using what are called “rubrics,” is focused on developing direct assessments of student achievement in relation to some of the most difficult of the liberal learning goals to assess, such as analytical, critical and creative thinking.  We will  have the opportunity to test these rubrics at St. Lawrence sometime this fall.