Welcome and Remarks
Commencement - May 23, 1999
Colleagues and distinguished guests, faculty, trustees,
parents, friends and family of graduating seniors and masters
candidates, members of the wider St. Lawrence family, and-most
of all-graduating seniors and masters candidates, whether
you are summa cum laude, magna cum laude, cum laude, or "thank
you Lordy," a very warm welcome to this, the commencement
ceremony of the Class of 1999.
You seniors are about to graduate from a distinguished American
liberal arts college. We are a healthy, dynamic, exciting,
and ambitious institution just now. We are investing, confidently,
in those things that we know work in undergraduate education.
I believe that we have never been better at what we do. We
should feel terrific about where we are.
And yet, as a class of institution, liberal arts colleges
have felt almost under siege in the last decade or so-especially
liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence that have high tuition
and high determination to continue to focus on liberal education,
not vocational education. Here's just one recent example-a
Dilbert cartoon sent to me by Katy MacKay '70, St. Lawrence
trustee.
Dilbert: I made a few upgrades to your design, Alice.
Alice: Do you realize you're not an engineer?
Dilbert: I'm better! I'm a well-rounded graduate of a liberal
arts college. The broad exposure to diverse topics made me
what I am today-a modern Renaissance man.
Alice: You scribbled out my timing circuit and wrote in "Moby
Dick by Charles Dickens."
Dilbert: Exactly. I'll bet you didn't learn that in your
engineering classes.
We see several stereotypes in this brief cartoon simultaneously:
the common presumption of rigor and precision in technical
education, the presumption that liberal education is just
loose thinking, and, of course, the presumption that engineers
(and also scientists, by extension) have only technical education,
when we know that science and mathematics students, at least
at strong liberal arts colleges, have a great deal of education
in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
But it is the stereotype of liberal education as just loose
thinking, as aimless exploration that doesn't lead to anything
you can count on, that I want to respond to this morning,
because it leads to the assumption that liberal arts colleges
produce less significant student outcomes than other kinds
of institutions. This kind of stereotype persists in America
despite the best evidence ever compiled that it is we, the
liberal arts colleges, among all the various kinds of American
colleges and universities, that outperform the rest. I want
to give you some of that evidence in my remarks here today.
A half dozen years ago, a group of about 70 selective liberal
arts colleges began meeting annually in Annapolis to discuss
how we could better inform the public about us. For lack
of imagination we called ourselves "The Annapolis Group."
An outstanding recent product of this collaboration is an
entire issue of Daedalus, the journal of The American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, entitled Distinctively American: The
Residential Liberal Arts Colleges. It is a rich and sometimes
highly self-critical account of where we came from, why we
approach undergraduate education the way we do, and what
the documented outcomes of our efforts are. What is said
there is important, and I want to summarize three key points.
We Have Become A Smaller and Smaller Part of Higher Education
in America
First, the percentage of American college students majoring
in a traditional liberal arts discipline has fallen over
time, and liberal arts colleges have become a smaller and
smaller part of higher education in America. In 1970-71,
38% of undergraduate students majored in a traditional liberal
arts discipline. By 1994-95 it had dropped to 25%.
Using as the criterion that at least 40% of students major
in a liberal arts discipline-hardly a stringent measure-only
212 of the nearly 3,300 colleges and universities in America
qualified as liberal arts colleges in 1987 and even fewer
do today. As Mike McPherson, President of Macalester College,
and Morton Schapiro, Dean of Arts and Sciences at USC, say
in Daedalus:
. . . . today, in a vastly expanded higher education marketplace,
fewer than 250,000 students out of more than 14 million experience
education in a small residential college without graduate
students, where a substantial fraction of their colleagues
major in a liberal arts discipline. If one made the definition
of a "liberal arts college" more stringent, focusing on places
where a majority of students major in the liberal arts and
live on campus, and where admissions is moderately selective
. . . ., the numbers would drop further. Indeed, by this
standard, the nation's liberal arts students would almost
certainly fit easily inside a Big Ten football stadium: fewer
than 100,000 students out of over 14 million.
Because our numbers are so small, higher education public
policy makers often ignore us when it's time to be at the
table for discussions of the future. As a result, I and my
liberal arts college presidential colleagues work long and
hard to be sure we are at the table.
We Remain Committed to Liberal Education for a Life
We need to be there not just because, as I will explain
in a minute, we have the largest impact on students of any
kind of college, but because we, increasingly almost alone
in higher education, remain committed to providing an education
for a life and not just for a living. As Eva Brann, tutor
and former dean at St. John's College in Annapolis, says
in her contribution to our Daedalus volume:
. . . . .training for the future is, in the words of Octavio
Paz, 'preparing a prison for the present.' We offer an education
that is, to be sure, extended, expensive, nonutilitarian,
uncertain (and certainly unquantifiable) in outcome, and
possibly destabilizing. But here we love learning and are
ready to help [our students] love it. . . .
At the same time, Brann says:
. . . . the facts skew even the purest intentions of those
representing such an education. It is simply the case that
our students almost universally declare their education [.
. . . . learning undertaken for its own sake-not as a means
but as its own end- . . . . .] to have been of the greatest
use to them: in keeping them from being merely "mechanical," it
has made them both brave and versatile in facing practical
problems.
That is a sentiment with which the St. Lawrence faculty
very much agrees.
The Student Outcomes of Our Work Are Powerful and Lasting
But it is the essay by Alexander Astin of UCLA, who for
over 30 years has led a nationally-recognized group of scholars
engaged in assessing the effects of college on students,
that documents most fully the powerful and lasting educational
outcomes of selective liberal arts colleges. Selective liberal
arts colleges, it is clear from his studies, much more frequently
engage in the educational "best practices" shown by research
to lead most directly to positive learning and student development
outcomes. Therefore, and not surprisingly, positive outcomes
actually happen more frequently at selective liberal arts
colleges than at any other type of American higher education
institution. This is so even after controlling for the abilities
students bring with them when they enroll. The research demonstrates
value added by the college, not qualities brought by students
to the college. Astin says these best practices are:
· Frequent student-faculty interaction
· Frequent student-student interaction
· Generous expenditures on student services
· A strong faculty emphasis on diversity
· Frequent [enrollment by students in] interdisciplinary
and humanities courses . . . . .
· Frequent use of courses that emphasize writing
· Frequent use of narrative evaluations
· Infrequent use of multiple-choice exams
· Frequent involvement of students in independent research
· Frequent involvement of students in faculty research
These "best practices" are what you graduating seniors
experienced in your time here. They are our normal way of
doing business. We are deeply committed to their perpetuation.
All of what you have seen us do in the past several years-from
facilities construction, to adding faculty, to development
of new programs, to establishing our new University Fellows
Program-has been devoted to making it possible for us to
expand our use of these best practices. The faculty and administration
of this university are fiercely determined to ensure that
the things about St. Lawrence that have been good for you
will be here in even greater abundance in the future. I guarantee
that you will find them here when you come back to see us
after graduation, as you most certainly will, many, many
times.
Conclusion
Well, it's time to say goodbye. We will miss the Class of
1999 very, very much. You have stretched us, and amazed us
with your growth and development. We wish you enormous good
luck. And when you do return for your first homecoming, I
hope that it is as strikingly beautiful and meaningful as
the one described in Eben Holden, the famous turn-of-the-century
novel by our own Irving Baccheler, Class of 1882. Indeed,
it is one of my favorite passages in that book:
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.
This North Country land, and the St. Lawrence University
that is so much a part of it, will, I sincerely hope, be
something that you too end up loving all the days of your
life. Thank you, and God bless you.
