You are all terrific to join us for this great St. Lawrence evening. It’s
a chance for us to get together each year to celebrate St. Lawrence, recognize
your critical involvement in St. Lawrence’s present and future, and
focus for a time on some of the most important strategic issues facing the
university. It is also an opportunity to express our warmest and deepest
thanks to each and every one of you for your outstanding generosity and thoughtfulness.
St. Lawrence is on the move. We would be dead in the water without your support.
Thank you; thank you; thank you!
Last year, you may recall, our venue was The United Nations, and our focus
was on international education at St. Lawrence. I described the scale and
breadth of our international programs, the contribution international students
make to the learning environment on campus, the strong level of interest
prospective students have in colleges with extensive offerings in international
education, and our exciting plans for a new global studies initiative. The
global studies initiative, as I indicated in my memo to you after our winter
board meeting, was recently given a huge boost from a $1 million grant from
the Christian A. Johnson Foundation, and we have reason to believe that significant
additional support will soon be forthcoming from The Ford Foundation. This
new Christian Johnson grant was its second major grant to St. Lawrence during
the current capital campaign. I indicated to you last year at this time that
international education would continue to be a key strategic thrust at St.
Lawrence, and we have kept that promise.
Tonight I want to talk with you about the arts at St. Lawrence, and then
I’m going to turn the program over to Professor George Torres of the
Music Department and some wonderful students. George is filling a new position
in the department that we created just last year to reintroduce instrumental
music into the music curriculum. He’ll tell you something of what he’s
up to, and his students, members of Ensemble St. Laurent, will perform some
selections from their spring concert of last Thursday—their first ever
in what I greatly hope will become a strong, new St. Lawrence musical tradition.
You got a brief “heads up” from me on the issue of the arts at
St. Lawrence in the post-board-meeting memo to which I just referred. Let
me elaborate just a little to set the stage for George.
The Arts at St. Lawrence Today
One of the most critical and vexing strategic issues at the university today
is the role the arts can and should play in a St. Lawrence liberal education.
I suspect that, like me, you take it as self-evident that a rich, diverse,
and demanding program in the arts should be a central pillar of the curriculum
at any strong liberal arts college. In many respects, liberal arts education
is about expanding our students’ ways of knowing as much as it is
about focusing on what they specifically should know. But this notion is
not self-evident everywhere, and I’m not sure it has been sufficiently
self-evident at St. Lawrence over its long history. It’s fair to
say, I think, that historically we have chosen to develop other dimensions
of St. Lawrence more than we have chosen to develop the arts.
While it is good for liberal arts colleges to be distinctive in certain ways—to
have well-developed strengths that set them apart from other colleges—a
good presidential friend of mine cautions that if you look carefully at the
liberal arts colleges our society says are the best, you will see that they
have strength and balance all across the curriculum. I believe that should
be our goal at St. Lawrence, both for the best of educational reasons and
also for reasons of institutional student recruitment competitiveness.
Our admissions research clearly indicates that, more than any other single
thing we could do, investing strategically in the arts would best ensure
for St. Lawrence the kind of student body that will take fullest advantage
of the university.
St. Lawrence has four departments with academic programs in the arts: Fine
Arts (which includes studio art and art history and features seven full-time
faculty); Speech and Theater, with six full-time faculty, some technical
support, and a part-time instructor in ballet; Music, with four full-time
faculty, including one whose primary responsibility is the choral program;
and finally, our creative writing program, within the English Department,
which claims five of the department’s 16 full-time faculty. Combined,
faculty in the arts number 22, or about 14% of the University’s total
full-time faculty.
Taken as a whole, some of the best teaching at St. Lawrence happens in the
arts. Student evaluations of the quality of teaching in the arts are consistently
above the all-faculty average. This is especially the case when the measure
is “overall effectiveness of instructor” and “established
and maintained high standards.” St. Lawrence faculty in the arts are,
on average, both strong and demanding, and our students recognize and celebrate
that.
Studies of Prospective Students Who Inquire
But Do Not Apply
On the other hand, despite the high quality of teaching in the arts at St.
Lawrence, enrollment of students who plan significant engagement with our
arts programs does not reflect the level of interest that exists among prospective
students. In the spring of 1997, near the end of my first year as president,
we commissioned an extensive study of current and prospective students to
see what it is about St. Lawrence our best and most satisfied current students
like and whether prospective students are interested in those same things.
The most important finding centered on current and prospective students’ interest
and participation in the arts. We learned that we enroll far fewer than we
should of students who want a meaningful experience in the arts as part of
their undergraduate education, and we learned also that those we don’t
enroll are, in fact, highly desirable students.
The researchers asked current students and prospective students who inquired
but did not apply to rate the importance of a series of goals. Researchers
then performed a cluster analysis that grouped together the students who
responded in similar patterns. One cluster, identified as “artistically
inclined,” included students who indicated that among their important
personal goals were: “becoming accomplished in one of the performing
arts,” “writing original works,” and/or “creating
artistic works.” Of current students, only 7% were members of the “artistically
inclined” cluster. However, among prospective students who did not
apply, 25% were “artistically inclined.” That translates to 7,500
of our 30,000 inquiries. In other words, a large number of prospective students
with strong interests in the arts explore St. Lawrence enough to be in touch
with us initially. They must see some things in our literature and on our
website that intrigue them, but then, disproportionately, they neither apply
nor enroll.
This outcome is especially unfortunate because this cluster of prospective
students has a set of other characteristics that make them highly desirable
to us—characteristics that we find in the students we do enroll who
are artistically inclined, like those with us tonight as part of Ensemble
St. Laurent:
· For these artistically inclined
inquirers, the desire to attend a particular college would
be increased greatly by the following: if all qualified
students are able to pursue independent research on a topic
of special interest to them; if students with the same
interest can live together in special residence halls;
if the college provides an international perspective for
all students; if students frequently team up with a professor
to conduct research; and if, in some programs, students
in the same academic course live together. These are all
things we do now at St. Lawrence and in every case we are
moving to do more.
· For artistically inclined students the list of extremely attractive
features of a college includes: improves public speaking skills, improves writing
skills, teaches how to work in small teams, helps you become a more independent
thinker, creates a sense of community, provides an introduction to the college
experience, and allows you to make friends quickly. Again, more than other groups
of inquirers, these students evidence a real seriousness of purpose with regard
to their college experience. They are interested in the things in which we believe
strong students should be interested.
So, we not only attract far fewer of these students than their proportion
in our inquiry pool, they also have qualities that we would love to see
represented more broadly among our students. It is a double loss.
Compared to my time at St. Lawrence more than 30 years ago, opportunities
in the arts are far more extensive now. Still, there are significant gaps
in our programs and, unfortunately, the breadth, depth, and diversity of
what we offer in several key areas compares unfavorably with our competitors – whether
those colleges are of higher, equal, or lower overall institutional quality.
This has profound consequences for admissions recruitment.
The Future of the Arts at St. Lawrence
It is clear to me, my staff, the faculty, our students, and increasingly
the Board of Trustees that expanding and enriching our programs in the
arts is critical to our future. In music and dance especially we limit
our students’ potential for artistic learning and development. Fixing
the problem will require both faculty growth and facilities improvements,
but it will also require finding the right strategy.
On the one hand, just catching up to the competition by expanding our offerings
within existing departmental structures might make a big difference in and
of itself. Our research shows clearly the price we pay in admissions for
not providing the richness and breadth of programs in the arts that prospective
students seek and find in other colleges.
On the other hand, just catching up may mean missing a once-in-a-generation
opportunity to organize arts education at St. Lawrence in new ways – perhaps
with new connections among disciplines – “out of the box” ways
that could produce much more powerful student learning outcomes and admissions
consequences. We must consider this possibility very carefully, and some
of our most creative and effective faculty have begun to do so.
One very intriguing initiative has emerged in recent months from a group
led by Albert Glover of the English Department—a group in which George
Torres has been very centrally mixed up—and it is linked to an equally
interesting idea that came to me from a group of students in the arts. St.
Lawrence has become widely known for our First-Year Program (FYP), where
freshmen live in one of twelve thematic “colleges” and take a
team-taught, interdisciplinary course of their choice together. In the ten
years since the program began, not one of the FYP colleges has had the arts
as its focus. George and several colleagues are planning to fix that as of
the fall of 2000.
One reason we have not had an arts FYP stems from facilities constraints
that affect our arts programs more broadly. Studios are cramped. Gulick Theater
doubles as our primary music performance space, which limits its use for
theater productions and teaching. Rehearsal and practice spaces are limited,
and those we do have are scheduled heavily. There is almost no informal,
student-controlled space for arts work outside of that which is connected
to specific classes. This was brought to my attention dramatically recently
when I received a striking proposal from the ten students who live together
in the Artists’ Guild, a theme house on Park Street. They have requested
that the University create dedicated spaces for them to perform and practice—spaces
they can claim as their own for non-class-related arts activity.
Perhaps what captured my attention most in the Artist Guild proposal is the
philosophy behind it. These students insist that their membership represent
a cross-section of the arts so they can learn broadly from each other. Their
request includes studio space for painting, sculpture, and ceramics, a small
black box theatre, and music rehearsal space – all attached to their
living space. I would add space for dance. It is a marvelous idea – something
we should encourage and accomplish as quickly as we can. Part of what George
and his colleagues are doing now is using the proposal from the Artists’ Guild
students as the conceptual springboard to renovate space within an existing
residence hall to serve the purposes of both an arts first-year college and
upper class students in the arts. I hope he’ll tell you something of
what his group’s thinking is on this in a moment.
Best of all, any arts facilities renovation in student residential space
that we undertake through this endeavor will also be of use in the long-term,
even after a future renovation of the Noble Center. I am tremendously excited
by this development. It gives us an important reason to begin talking with
faculty about the overall configuration of the arts at St. Lawrence while
creating a major impact on admissions recruitment now. And all of this can
happen at a much lower capital investment in the short run. This strategy
will also enable us to increase incrementally, over time, the number of faculty
in the arts, which is also a critical necessity.
So, while merely playing “catch-up” would improve our position
relative to our competitors, we have decided to pursue this bolder strategy.
We believe it holds the promise – if our imagination is up to it – of
leap-frogging the competition, with all that means for the quality of what
we provide our students and for the long-term benefit to St. Lawrence’s
admissions position relative to our competition.
I hope you can see from this why life is so exciting at St. Lawrence just
now. These conversations in the arts are enormously stimulating. But they
are occurring alongside conversations in science and mathematics, global
studies, and the social sciences—especially our continued conversations
leading toward the establishment of a student/faculty research center focused
on studies of the North Country. We recall almost every day the old Chinese
curse: “May you live in interesting times!” And I must say that
it has not escaped me that some of you in this room tonight might find one
or more of these ideas completely irresistible as you are considering your
own future philanthropy.
Introduce George Torres
With that, let me formally introduce George Torres to you. George came to
St. Lawrence this year from Cornell, where he last year completed his Ph.D.
in musicology. His areas of focus include Renaissance and Baroque Music
and various ethnomusicological studies, including Spanish folk music, Javanese
drumming, Latin-American music and the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
His dissertation examined the development of the 17th-century French lute
repertoire. He has been transcribing Renaissance and Baroque music from
French, German, Spanish and English sources since 1977.
His ethnomusicological interests go back to his undergraduate days at the
California Institute of the Arts where he studied Indonesian, Indian and
African music. He played in the Javanese Gamelan and studied ciblon drumming.
As a performer, he has played guitar and lute for over 20 years as a soloist,
accompanist, chamber musician and director of various groups from collegium
to conjunto.
At St. Lawrence, in addition to teaching music literature and performance,
George is building opportunities for talented student musicians to combine
in specially-constructed ensembles that reflect the mix of instruments available
on campus at a given time. His is the first step of what I hope will be many
steps intended to bring unusual, not just “catch up,” breadth,
depth, and diversity to our music program. George Torres.
When Ensemble St. Laurent and George are Finished
Thank you, Ensemble St. Laurent. We are headed down some new and very interesting
roads for St. Lawrence in the arts. Keep tuned to our progress. Current and
future generations of St. Lawrence students are going to be the wonderful
beneficiaries of a great deal of exciting and thoughtful faculty and student
creativity.
Let me now turn the program back to Ed Wilson.
