St. Lawrence University: President

Initially surprising to many Laurentians is the number of St. Lawrence alumni on the West Coast. Our most recent tally shows 1,662 alumni, with the class years ranging from 1922 to 2000, living in California, Oregon and Washington. Of course, though, the kinds of talented and adventurous graduates we produce would naturally move disproportionately to where a good part of the action is in the soc-called “new economy.”
Ann and I visited with a number of these alumni – leaders and entrepreneurs – on a trip to California in June. Naturally, I asked them how St. Lawrence looks from there, and especially how well they think we’re doing preparing students for the economy they are helping to create. In several cased, however, I didn’t get a chance before they hopped on me with some fairly critical observations that I’m still processing. These incredibly sharp and successful alumni with such high standards for themselves and the enterprises in which they are involved expect, appropriately, no less from St. Lawrence as we prepare students for the challenges of the new economy.
Several began by saying that, whatever may be happening on campus, from the vantage point of someone on the West Coast who finds it hard to get back to the North Country it’s not clear that we’re doing anything in particular to prepare students for the new economy. If we are, it’s not referenced in the magazine, or in my letters to alumni, or in the catalog, or on our Web site. And since they are incredibly busy and challenged in their own work, they don’t have the time to look at us deeply and carefully, so they conclude that we have become or are becoming irrelevant. They don’t, they said, expect us to produce graduates who will invent the transforming new technologies – that’s for Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT and others to do. But they do expect us, if we’re going to be relevant, to educate students for the many other critical leadership roles so necessary to creating wealth in the new economy and dealing with this wealth responsibly – roles many of them believe are even more important than invention. While they recognize that much of what students learning in a liberal arts education could be helpful to learning how to lead in the new economy, they don’t believe we’ll get it right until we focus on that more systematically.
I protested. What about our new global studies initiative, described elsewhere in this magazine? Our strong record of producing science and mathematics graduates in numbers disproportionate to our size? Our historic and continuing disproportionate role in supplying graduates who go into finance, especially investment banking, and the disproportionate number of our graduates in top leadership posts in companies all across America? Our strong history of graduating students well trained in environmental studies, since the new economy must also be a sustainable economy? Our attention, recognized clearly by graduating seniors in their exit surveys, to writing and speaking well, and to critical thinking? Our emphasis on teaching students how to do research, symbolized most clearly by our new University Fellow Program, also described in this issue, and the decision of the faculty last spring to require a “senior experience” of all students, assuming adequate resources can be made available? And since the new economy is so much more a global economy, our very high number of graduates who have studied abroad?
These alumni listened patiently but almost invariably said in response: “So many things are new – even counterintuitive – about the new economy that unless you and the faculty are focusing explicit attention on it, bringing things together for students, they will miss it and St. Lawrence will be irrelevant when it comes to preparing students for the social and economic dynamic of the 21st century.” We must, they argued, also be systematically alert to what leadership and entrepreneurship are all about today. Some leaders and entrepreneurs are born, they said, but not many.
Aren’t you, I asked, suggesting that we should just become a business school? “No,” was the universal reply, “but you must help students learn what is truly new about today’s world economy or the pace of it all will just run them over, no matter what kind of career they choose, from the ministry and teaching, to for-profit entrepreneurship.”
There is much to discuss, of course, about how new the new economy really is, or at least in what ways it is new. One alumnus in the group we met said, “There is nothing in the new economy that requires anything new in liberal education. A liberal arts education is still the best preparation.” But he was on outlier in this group.
A concern of mine, I said, is that too few leaders of the new economy seem to care enough about mitigating the wrenching social consequences of the world economic transformation they are leading. Shouldn’t, I said, an education for the new economy also include understanding how to temper for the least well-off the social consequences of rapid economic change so that the world political stability necessary to global economic success might in fact happen, through democratic rather than authoritarian means? That too should be a part of it, said some of these California alumni, though others felt that one just had to let happen what will happen.
The “so what” of all of this for St. Lawrence is not clear. I believe these alumni underestimate what we’re already doing to prepare our students well for the future the new economic order is producing. Many of our graduates, including them, are helping to make the economic revolution that is under way. On the other hand, I must grant that the issues on their minds cannot be found anywhere in our curriculum nicely packaged so that students who want to grapple with them know where to find them. We can do much better at this, although it is also fair to ask if the Industrial Revolution was nicely packaged for study while it was in its early stages and poorly understood. In addition, there are things they would have us do much better and more, such as leadership and teamwork education, getting our students more frequently into the field through internships and opportunities to do research so they get early and good exposure to what’s going on, and bringing alumni leaders to campus to talk with students and share their experience and understanding. I heartily agree, and we are working hard at each of those.
My reason for raising these issues here is to stimulate your reaction and comment. I’m going to be carrying these questions forward for discussion on campus as we try to respond appropriately to the questions these California alumni raised – questions that I believe we must take quite seriously even if our answers may not always be the same. Let me know your thoughts. You can reach me in the traditional ways, or by e-mail at dsullivan@stlawu.edu.