Notes for Welcoming Remarks – Fall Admissions Weekend
Daniel F. Sullivan – September 12, 1998

• Welcome
• It’s not an accident that we chose to start your day of visitation at St. Lawrence in this historic place. Gunnison Memorial Chapel was built in 1926. It is named in memory of Almon Gunnison, St. Lawrence’s fifth president, and a member of one of the largest and most important St. Lawrence families.
  • This is where some of the most significant university events have taken place historically, and still do today. Indeed, in the fall of 1960, I sat like you in this chapel, a high school senior from New Jersey considering St. Lawrence. I did decide to come as a freshman in the fall of 1961, graduated four years later after what proved to be a life-transforming undergraduate education, and now have the unparalleled privilege of serving my alma mater as president.
  • So welcome to this very special spot! In its simple, straightforward beauty, the architecture of this chapel says much about St. Lawrence—tell us, at the end of your day, if you agree.
• To give you a sense of the St. Lawrence of today, I need first to say something about our history—for it is in the history of a place that you can begin to grasp how a college got the character it has today.
  • St. Lawrence was founded in 1856 by people of the village with financial and moral support from the Unitarian Universalist Church and the State of New York. As was typical of college foundings in the 19th century, village investors put up the land and some initial capital, the state provided a grant to allow the first building to be built—Richardson Hall, just out the front door of the chapel where we’re convening today—and the church provided important operating support for a time.
  • In the beginning, there was both a college of arts and sciences and a theological school, with separate boards of trustees. The college of arts and sciences, which is what remains today, was always independent of church control but influenced in subtle and important ways by the affiliation with the theological school. And through maintenance of an active chaplaincy today, we recognize that our students are often on spiritual journeys of widely varying kinds, as well as intellectual journeys, and we seek to support them in that.
  • Few people know that it was St. Lawrence, around the turn of the century, that started the agricultural and technical college that is now SUNY Canton, across town. Acquired by the state shortly thereafter, until the 1960’s SUNY Canton resided next door in buildings that we acquired when the campus was moved.
  • The first graduate of the school of theology was a woman named Olympia Brown, who received her degree in 1863. She was also the first woman in America to be ordained a minister. Interestingly, one of the two U.S. Senators from Maine is also named Olympia, but she is not the St. Lawrence alumna who is a U.S. Senator from Maine. That is Susan Collins ’75, recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Laws from her alma mater this past May.
  • The first two graduates of the college of arts and sciences received their degrees in 1865, just at the end of the Civil War, and both were also women. That gives me an excuse to tell you that St. Lawrence is the oldest continuously co-educational college or university in New York. We take women’s issues seriously here.
  • Even more interesting for my message to you this morning, however, is that one of the first two graduates from the college of arts and sciences came from Lowville, just down the road and very much in the North Country, while the other came from Manhattan, a bit farther down the road and very much not the North Country. From the very beginning St. Lawrence has been an interesting and exciting blend of values characteristic of the North Country, then very much a frontier, and cosmopolitan values originating in the wider world beyond.
• There is about St. Lawrence a common sense approach to things, a humility and straightforwardness, and a willingness to strike out boldly into the unknown that our North Country forebears have passed on to us. At the same time there is also here something cosmopolitan, worldly, progressive and reformist, committed to equality, equity and truth-telling—Universalist values joined to our frontier heritage.
  • You can see some of this “one foot in the North Country and one in the wider world” in our distinctive programs. For example, Environmental Studies has both a North Country and a global focus; Canadian Studies ensures that we take advantage of all there is to learn from and about our neighbors to the north; and from this North Country base we send 35-40% of our students overseas to study and have a faculty almost 50% of whom have significant international training and expertise.
  • You can also see it in our students who combine the drive and curiosity necessary to perform on a global stage with a love of the North Country and a commitment to an intelligent and balanced use of the wonderfully beautiful and bountiful environment with which we are blessed here.
  • And you can see it in the ways in which our students, faculty and staff organize their recreation—sometimes off on the mountains, lakes, and rivers of the North Country, and then off to the exciting international cities nearby for a touch of their sophistication and excitement. We are the American liberal arts college that is located closest to the national capital of a foreign country—Ottawa is 1 ¼ hours away by car—and our students use the access we have to key nearby Canadian cities as a counterbalance to the rural outdoors of our immediate vicinity.
  • This is a wonderful location for a college!
• A second message I want to leave with you this morning has to do with our mission. St. Lawrence exists to provide undergraduate students a challenging, life-transforming liberal arts education. While we expect faculty to have ongoing programs of scholarship, because we believe students will learn better how to think, analyze, and write if their faculty are modeling those activities themselves, the University has no direct research mission. The entirety of our focus is on teaching and student learning, and the faculty here are passionate about getting it right. If some universities and a portion of the nation's professoriate have relegated undergraduate education to second- or third-class status, it is our highest priority—our reason for being. There is a student-centeredness here that our alumni and students believe is distinctive. It is my job to ensure that this is so.
• At the same time, when you’re in the St. Lawrence bookstore, go to the section that displays faculty books. You will be surprised at the number and diversity. This faculty models wonderfully the scholarship we hope our students will both come to appreciate and do themselves.
• Look around in the bookstore some more and you will see that it is filled with trade books, not just textbooks. That is because our students and faculty—indeed, large numbers of people in our community—are readers of literature and other scholarship. When you visit other campuses, look at what’s on sale in the bookstore as one indication of the kind of learning community it is.
• I also need to tell you that one of my highest priorities is to increase the size of the faculty here, because there is no substitute in a liberal arts college for the kind of one-on-one contact with faculty we provide. We added three faculty positions this year, and have approved six more for next year on our way to a total increase over 5-7 years of as many as 25. In this time of financial stress in higher education, we are most unusual in our strategic commitment to faculty building.
• Finally, I want to say something about where St. Lawrence fits among colleges and universities in America today. Students considering St. Lawrence, we know from our research, are typically considering three kinds of colleges and universities at this stage in their search: other liberal arts colleges representing a wide range in quality, cost and location; predominantly undergraduate public colleges and universities, typically in the northeast; and research universities, both public and private.
• You’ve read the guide books. You know where we stand compared to other liberal arts colleges. But I want to tell you some ways in which objective data place us among the best:
  • Our library is top quality, whether one examines collection size, sophistication and availability of information access technology, staff size or staff quality. Our recent Middle States accreditation review confirmed this. Over a very long time, St. Lawrence has made its library one of its most important investments. We are currently in the midst of a renovation of the library, which will add 10-15 years to its holding capacity. It is a place where exceptional students and faculty pursue serious study in the liberal arts amid a rich array of scholarly resources.
  • Our international programs and rate of student participation in them are among the best. St. Lawrence faculty have been wonderfully thoughtful and creative in this area for a long time. About 35% of St. Lawrence students since the late 1960’s have studied abroad, and nearly 20% of those have attended our own unusual and highly-regarded program in Kenya. In addition, as I said earlier, we are the American liberal arts college located closest to the capital of a foreign country, and we take advantage of that with distinguished offerings in Canadian Studies.
  • Some of our outcomes in science and mathematics education match those of the best liberal arts colleges. For example, we rank 31st among all American liberal arts colleges in the number of our graduates who have earned PhDs in science or mathematics over the last decade, and we possess one of the rare undergraduate mathematics departments whose teaching evaluations rank consistently and greatly above the all-faculty average.
  • St. Lawrence has an absolutely top quality information technology network, with an infrastructure investment made 10 years ago and maintained since, significantly ahead of our competitors. And our information technology people have a strongly student-centered attitude—something our students appreciate a great deal. I spoke earlier about our historically and presently large investment annually in our library; we spend as much each year on information technology as we do on the library. Both are critical and absolutely necessary in a modern liberal arts college.
• Finally—and I mention this because it is so important to the kind of student who chooses St. Lawrence—we have absolutely top quality programs in recreation and athletics. We offer 32 intercollegiate sports, including Division I men’s and women’s hockey where we are the smallest college with a Division I program but compete successfully with the likes of Harvard, BU, Princeton, Cornell and others—a David competing with many Goliaths. Over the next 3-5 years we will be investing +/- $20 million to upgrade our recreation and athletic facilities for all students and members of our community.
• These things I mention because they can be documented readily. In many other less tangible ways St. Lawrence also ranks among the best liberal arts colleges. I will also say, however, that this university has never sacrificed its commitment to community while it pursues excellence in its academic and other offerings. It is important to us that students love this place, and that they leave here wanting to maintain a lifelong relationship. Our alumni will tell you that it is so.
• A second group of colleges with which we compete heavily is predominantly undergraduate public colleges and universities in the northeast. Typically students and parents considering St. Lawrence and a public option are concerned about the relative cost. I can understand that. What I do want such students and parents to know, however, is that a decision to opt for low cost brings with it low investment per student in educational programs.
• Data from a recent book by McPherson and Schapiro show that over the last two decades educational investments at independent colleges and universities like St. Lawrence have grown at about 4% per year in real terms, while investments at public universities and colleges have barely or not kept up with inflation. A real quality gap has emerged in the aggregate as this difference in spending has compounded over many years.
• At the same time, St. Lawrence makes a very major investment every year in student financial aid from its own funds—nearly $18 million this year—while we also continue to provide a substantial subsidy to every student who pays full tuition because of our endowment, exceptional fund raising for current operations, and physical plant fully paid for by previous gifts. This level of student financial aid can make the actual cost of a St. Lawrence education very competitive with the cost of a public institution for many students, while all students receive value far beyond what they pay in tuition.
• Finally, St. Lawrence competes heavily with a group of fine research universities. We know from experience that students looking at research universities as options are looking for a richness and diversity in program offerings that they do not believe are available in liberal arts colleges, and they also believe that by attending a research university they will be close to where knowledge is discovered, to where research occurs. The paradox here is that they are far more likely to engage in research in collaboration with, or closely mentored by, a faculty member at St. Lawrence than at any research university of which I am aware.
  • A major Big Ten university boasts that 600 undergraduates do research closely supervised by faculty each year, out of over 40,000. Some 250-300 do so each year at St. Lawrence, and if the faculty adopts the required senior project they are now discussing, all St. Lawrence students will benefit from that kind of exceptional experience.
  • We seek to deliver an education that involves active, not passive, learning where students actually do the disciplines they are studying, not just read about them or hear about them in large lectures. This is especially so in science, where I believe we have a clear competitive advantage in comparison to research universities.
  • Few people understand that independent liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence graduate much higher percentages of their students with a major in natural science or mathematics than any of the comprehensive research universities. If I were thinking of majoring in science today, I would attend a strong liberal arts college.
  • St. Lawrence is a distinguished, national liberal arts college with a proud history of accomplishments, a first-rate faculty and academic program, a strong financial position, strong fund-raising results and substantial capital fund-raising capacity. I’m biased, I know, but I thought you should know how I feel.
• I want to close by reading you a short passage from what is perhaps deservedly the most famous novel of the North Country—Eben Holden, written by St. Lawrence alumnus and trustee Irving Bacheller and published just before the turn of the century. It sold over 250,000 copies in hard cover at the time. In this passage, Bacheller writes about the spectacular beauty of this place in winter, and about coming home to his beloved North Country. It describes what our students say they feel when they near St. Lawrence coming back from breaks, and what our alumni say they feel as they are returning for reunions and other events.
  • “The north country lay buried in the snow that Christmastime. Here and there the steam plough had thrown its furrows, on either side of the railroad, high above the window line. The fences were muffled in long ridges of snow, their stakes showing like pins in a cushion of white velvet. Some of the small trees on the edge of the big timber stood overdrifted to their boughs. I have never seen such a glory of the morning as when the sun came up, that day we were nearing home, and lit the splendour of the hills, there in the land I love. The frosty nap of the snow glowed far and near with pulsing glints of pale sapphire.”
• I hope you have a spectacular visit with us today. You have my very best wishes as you continue your college search. If your search ends at St. Lawrence, we will be here to welcome you most warmly to this very special place. Thank you!