Remarks: Daniel F. Sullivan—President’s Dinner
New York City—March 29, 2001

It’s absolutely terrific of you to join us for this very special St. Lawrence evening. This is my fifth President’s Dinner. The time has gone by incredibly fast. The competition among selective colleges and universities for America’s best students has continued to increase. To use a track analogy, I feel as if St. Lawrence is about thirty yards into a 100-yard dash. Though we got out of the blocks a bit behind the other sprinters, at 30 yards we are starting to gain strength. Our legs are growing stronger, our confidence that we might catch up and pass the other runners is increasing, and the next 70 yards will tell the tale. I love winning that kind of race. It is a race that has as its goal transforming in positive ways some of the nation’s best and brightest young people. It is the best of work, in my view, and I know you feel the same way.
I want to take a brief moment before we begin to thank Ed Wilson, for this is his last President’s Dinner as chair of the board of trustees. I have seen a lot of colleges, met with and worked with lots of trustees, and seen many board chairs in action. No college in America has a better board chair, and no president has had better or wiser support and commitment from a board chair than I have had these five years at St. Lawrence. And to make it even better, with Ed comes Betsy, whose support of Ann and me during these years has been both wonderful and most warmly appreciated. They’re going to take a year away from board involvement to catch their wind, and then will re-engage in emeritus status. Please join me in a round of applause for them both!
And let me also recognize and thank Larry Winston, who has agreed with naïve enthusiasm to succeed Ed Wilson as chair come the end of June. I say “naïve enthusiasm” because no one can really understand how hard and important the work of being chair is until they do it. As you can imagine, we try to keep prospective chairs naïve! Larry and I are going to make a good team. I’m greatly looking forward to it. Please give him a round of applause for taking on that important job!
This is my chance each year to share something of our institutional strategy with our most thoughtful and supportive alumni, parents, and friends; celebrate some successes; and thank each and every one of you for your outstanding generosity. St. Lawrence is on the move. You have fueled our engines, lifted our spirits, and shared your strong encouragement when you think we’re getting it right. We would be nowhere without you. Thank you all, most warmly!
Two Important Successes
As it happens, there are two critically important successes from this year that I’d like to mention. The first is our truly remarkable performance in Campaign St. Lawrence, where we passed our $75 million goal in late December of 1999, a full year early, enabling the Board to see its way to raising the goal to $130 million and adding two years to the length of the campaign. Today we stand at over $96 million, and we’re still moving forward nicely. The impact of this campaign is everywhere on campus. There is, for example, a growing list of new and renovated facilities. The latest addition is the Newell Field House and fitness center, which will be open in the fall. And this summer we will begin work on the Wachtmeister Field Laboratory, which will support our Integrated Science Education Initiative. This laboratory was made possible by a wonderful $1 million gift from Ted and Karen Wachtmeister and their sons Erik ’99 and Carl. Ted and Karen are with us tonight.
In addition, there are new programs, such as the Adirondack Semester; our Center for Teaching and Learning; and our new University Fellows Program (the focus of our program tonight). The Center for Teaching and Learning has just been funded by a new $170,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and we have received several endowments and spendable gifts in support of the University Fellows Program, including gifts from Lorna Ness ’75, Gregg Ferguson ’81, and trustee Katy MacKay ’70, all of whom are with us tonight. Finally, we have been blessed this past year to have received a number of new endowed scholarships that help keep St. Lawrence accessible to strong but needy students, such as the bequest of $1 million from the estate of Elizabeth Rice Robinson ‘27.
The tangible outcomes of this campaign, as you can see, are very visible, and they are one key component in our second important success—a fundamental strengthening of St. Lawrence’s competitive position in admissions. Applications for the Class of 2005 were up 7% over last year, including an 8% increase in early decision applicants and a 5% increase in minority applicants. We admitted 57% of them, compared to 69% of last year’s total. It has been at least 20 years since St. Lawrence admitted such a small percentage of its applicants. We have applications from 43 states and admits from 40; applications from 71 countries and admits from 19. Applications were up in every region except New York State, but we saw a 26% increase in applications from students living outside the northeast. In addition, the mean SAT score for our admitted applicants was up 15 points over last year to 1176, which is 30 points higher than two years ago.
Our goal is a class of 550 new students on campus on “count” day in September. That means we will need roughly 585 deposits by mid-May, because we will lose some to other institutions that take them off their waitlists over the summer. At this point, all signs are positive, and we are looking forward to seeing as many as 500-600 accepted students on campus for our various visiting days in April. Our qualitative sense is that interest in St. Lawrence among admitted students is very strong.
We are not yet where we ultimately want to be in admissions, but it’s clear that we are well on our way. Admissions success comes to liberal arts colleges that are academically demanding and highly focused on a holistic approach to student development; that work hard at everything to make things better; that have a clear and carefully thought through institutional strategy; and that are ambitious in the best sense—that is, ambitious to make a profound difference in the lives of students. That’s what we are about at St. Lawrence right now, and prospective students, their parents, and their high school counselors are noticing.
Student/Faculty Research in an Undergraduate Education of Excellence
Our focus tonight, however, is on student/faculty research in an undergraduate education of excellence. You know from our fall issue of St. Lawrence University Magazine about our new University Fellows Program. Tonight, we’re going to hear from two faculty members and seven students who participated in the University Fellows Program last summer. But before we do, I want to put our support of student/faculty research into context.
In an article I find myself returning to time and time again, entitled “How the Liberal Arts College Affects Students,” Alexander Astin, the Allan M. Cartter Professor of Higher Education at UCLA, says this:
One of the most intractable problems in American higher education is the issue of “research versus teaching.” Since residential liberal arts colleges, considered as a group, tend to put a much greater emphasis on . . . teaching than on . . . research, the question naturally arises: does research have a significant place in the American liberal arts college? More specifically, one might ask: Does a significant emphasis on research and scholarship necessarily come at the expense of student development? . . . . Can research in the liberal arts college actually be used to enhance the educational process?
To try to answer this question, Astin and his colleagues analyzed 212 colleges and universities of all types and developed indices of what they called “research orientation” and “student orientation.” An institution’s “research orientation” was measured by combining results from items like these in a faculty survey: number of publications per faculty member, hours per week spent on research and scholarly writing, subjective value faculty place on research versus teaching, receipt of outside funds to support research, time spent off campus in professional activities. “The student orientation of the faculty . . . . is based on the faculty’s expressed interest in and commitment to working with students on a personal basis,”2 also measured by combining results from several questions in the same faculty survey.
Their analysis of these data found that “research orientation” and “student orientation” were strongly and negatively correlated. That is, the higher the research orientation of the faculty, the lower the student orientation of the faculty. This, of course, intuitively is something we think we know and don’t like about research universities.
Astin and his colleagues then wanted to know if there were any institutions whose faculties were simultaneously above average in research orientation and in student orientation. There were about 20 among their institutional sample of 212, and they were all selective liberal arts colleges.
In further analyses, Astin and his colleagues found that selective liberal arts colleges whose faculties were both research oriented and student oriented were by far the most effective institutions of all kinds in accomplishing the academic and student development outcomes you and we work so hard for in our students. How does this happen?
One very important way in which it happens is through student/faculty research, where faculty members serve as mentors to students and students become apprentices, doing the discipline, not just hearing about it. In student/faculty research faculty hold students to very high standards, because the faculty member’s work is at stake also, and students perform wonderfully, stretching and growing in ways they often did not imagine they could. It happens, in other words, because at liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence faculty very often “express” or “realize” their research orientation by involving students in it. Their research orientation actually becomes student orientation, and the potential conflict between research and teaching goes away. Students become collaborators with faculty in research.
National survey data show that St. Lawrence students participate in research with faculty members or engage in research closely supervised by faculty more frequently than do students at other selective liberal arts colleges. Fully 43% of St. Lawrence first-year students reported having worked with a faculty member on a research project, compared to 24% of first-year students at the other liberal arts colleges in the study and in the sample institutions as a whole; and 65% of St. Lawrence seniors reported having worked with a faculty member on a research project compared to 52% and 38% at other liberal arts colleges and the national sample of institutions as a whole.
Does all of this translate into student satisfaction with the St. Lawrence faculty and academic program? As it happens, just yesterday I received the results from our latest first year and sophomore survey. Out of 26 items, first year students ranked “helpfulness of professors” 3rd in importance and 2nd in satisfaction; “quality of courses” 4th in importance and 3rd in satisfaction; and “faculty availability” 10th in importance and 1st in satisfaction. By sophomore year, students rank “faculty availability” 6th in importance, but still 1st in satisfaction. The results for the other faculty and class quality items were identical. I can tell you that the St. Lawrence faculty is very active in scholarship. We have other data that show this, in comparison to other national liberal arts college faculty. Our students are telling us that they are also highly student-oriented.
Our University Fellows Program was established to increase the already high levels of student/faculty research that I referred to earlier, and to enhance the quality of what can be accomplished, so as to leverage the scholarship of our faculty to the greatest extent. I have always believed that if we want students to become life-long learners, the faculty they look up to as models must be life-long learners. That is why we support faculty research, and especially why we support faculty research with students as collaborators.
My goal is to get to the point where from all sources—outside grants obtained by faculty, endowments and restricted gifts from individuals, and my own president’s discretionary funds—we are able to support 100 students in research with faculty each year. That would be extraordinary and wonderful, an outstanding community of learners on campus in the summer pushing their limits and forging the ideal undergraduate mentor/apprentice relationship. In this way St. Lawrence will maximize its impact on students, and the students who participate will have the educational time of their lives. This summer, the number will be about 35. We are on our way.
Let’s Hear from the Participants
But the best way for you to understand how this works is to hear from some of the faculty and students who were involved in the University Fellows Program last summer. You’ve got the names and biographies in your program, so I won’t repeat them. Let me call forward, then, Erika Barthelmess, who has the Grace J. Fippinger Junior Professorship in the Sciences, Mark McMurray, our special collections librarian, and students Vivek Bachhawat, James Boschen, Leah Brady, Todd Matte, Amanda Morrison, Rahab Mwangi, and Jacqueline Nyoro.
Question and Answer Period