Welcome and Remarks
Commencement—St. Lawrence University
Daniel F. Sullivan—May 21, 2000

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 2000—St. Lawrence’s millennium class.

You seniors and I have been here together from the very first day: we were first year students together, and we both made it! We have also both changed a great deal. I, for example, am a much more substantial person than I was when I came. One way in which that is so is that I can see much more of myself without looking in the mirror—when looking down at my toes, for example—than I could four years ago. Thankfully, you have grown in far more meaningful ways.

This brief sojourn into whimsicality invites a serious question, however. What do we know about how you have changed in your time at St. Lawrence? How have we begun to assess what the people in the trade call the "educational outcomes" of our joint project? One way is that, for a long time we have asked first year students to complete a survey on their very first day at St. Lawrence and then we ask many of the same questions in a senior survey four years later. The freshman survey, first administered here in 1971, tells us volumes about how first year students have changed over time—at least in their self-assessments, and in 1990 we began administering the survey to seniors. By comparing answers we can tell how individual students and, in aggregate, a whole class have changed while at St. Lawrence.

Let’s look at some data. The best I can do, unfortunately, is present senior year data for last year’s class. We haven’t had a chance to analyze your senior survey results yet, but we know that there is great continuity from year to year because the characteristics of incoming classes and St. Lawrence itself change only slowly. Major trends therefore take a number of years to become visible. So I am confident that the data for the Class of 1999 are very close to what we will find out about you later in the year. Trust me on this!

We’ll begin by examining some self-reported outcomes directly related to our educational goals for you. As freshmen you gave yourselves your highest self-ratings, "compared to the average person your age" on cooperativeness and academic ability, followed by drive to achieve, understanding of others, and physical health. You gave yourselves middling ratings on competitiveness, leadership ability, creativity, emotional health, and intellectual and social self-confidence. You gave yourselves your lowest self-ratings on writing ability, mathematical ability, popularity, artistic ability, and public speaking ability.

How did you change while here, assuming you changed in the ways that the Class of 1999 and previous classes changed? Your largest self-reported changes, I predict, will prove to have been major improvements in your public speaking and writing abilities, followed by major improvements in intellectual and social self-confidence. On this commencement day, assuming those self-reports correlate with actual changes in you, all of us can join in mutual satisfaction. Those are truly important ways in which to grow and develop while in college.

We will also discover, I predict, that your self-reported assessments will show significant improvement in leadership ability, popularity, understanding of others, artistic ability, competitiveness and drive to achieve. If the results are true to form, you will report no change in physical health. At least four years in the North Country didn’t make your health worse!

On mathematical ability, however, you will likely have reported a significant negative change when you compared yourselves to others your age, primarily because 20% of you took no mathematics while at St. Lawrence and 40% of you took just one course. So it will not be surprising if the majority of you saw yourselves as falling behind in mathematics.

On the whole, these results are very encouraging: you see yourselves as having improved significantly in critical ways we, your parents and you intended when you came to St. Lawrence. At the same time we know that these overall changes mask some important differences by gender. Male students report greater improvements in self-ratings in every category but one—cooperativeness, where women students improve and men actually report a decline—and male students show less of a decline in mathematical ability. In several categories—public speaking ability, understanding of others, academic ability and writing ability—males report much larger improvements.

Now this may not be all bad if you think that men are, in general, much more in need of improvement in those areas, regardless of where they start! That is certainly what my wife and daughter think about the men in their lives. In fact, men do need more improvement on such dimensions as "understanding of others" and writing ability, where they start out with much lower self-ratings. But they start out higher or equal to women in self-reported ratings on every other dimension except artistic ability.

All of this begs the question, of course, of the relationship between self-reported ratings and real underlying changes in ability. Perhaps what we’re seeing in these data is merely the acting out of old gender stereotypes with which we are all familiar:

• "Men just don’t get it and overestimate how much they do get."
• "Women are just naturally more self-critical and continually underestimate their achievement."

But these self-ratings have a kind of reality to them also. They represent what our students think of themselves before and after four years at St. Lawrence, and we have lots of other data that suggest that gender has become a huge factor in the way the student culture at St. Lawrence plays itself out.

For example, when I was a student here at St. Lawrence in the mid-1960s students were quite left of center, and men and women students were roughly in the same place politically, on average. In the early 1970’s, however, freshmen nationally and at St. Lawrence moved toward the political center, and again, men and women students were roughly in the same place. Around 1982, as the women’s movement continued to grow in strength, freshmen women nationally and at St. Lawrence began to move back left of center to the point where today they are roughly where freshman women and men were in the 1960s. Freshmen men, however, continued to move to the right politically to the point where, today, both at St. Lawrence and nationally, the most liberal freshman men are at about the same place politically as the most conservative freshman women!

This is a major gender gap, evident in the data on our students for a whole range of attitudes and values, not just political orientation, and I suspect its implications have been a powerful force in your experience of St. Lawrence over the last four years. At the same time we know that both men and women in the Class of 1999 moved to the left politically during their time here and by roughly the same amount. In addition, they (and I believe also you) became less likely to believe that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in America, and on a whole host of other issues they indicated greater awareness of the challenges we all face in trying to make this a better, more humane world in which to live. They became more sensitive and discerning regarding some major social issues that beset us, and that is truly good.

But, St. Lawrence students consistently in recent years expressed slightly less confidence as seniors than they did as freshmen that the individual can bring about change in society. They reported significant improvements in their abilities and self-confidence—especially their leadership ability—and greater awareness of issues that need to be tackled, but less confidence that the individual can make a difference. If we have somehow helped bring you to that state of mind, despite the other very positive things we have done together, that is disturbing.

Say it isn’t so for the great Class of 2000—St. Lawrence’s millennium class! Become the doers and the fixers and the leaders your predecessors have become. St. Lawrence alumni are everywhere, putting their liberal education to work. They are the U. S. Ambassador to Thailand, a U. S. Senator from Maine, the President of the American Mathematical Society, the Chief Veterinary Pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, the Auxiliary Roman Catholic Bishop of St. Paul and ministers of churches all over the world, CEOs and entrepreneurs, including the founder of Caribou Coffee (the coffee all of you enjoy in the bookstore), and even the President of St. Lawrence. They are making a difference in every walk of life, and most especially in the raising of children in the families they have created. They believe that the individual can make a difference. I believe you will get to that place also. I am counting on you! Don’t let me down!

Conclusion

Well, it’s time to say goodbye. We will miss the Class of 2000 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. It is my favorite passage in that book and I find that I cannot avoid reading it to you at commencement:

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 all!