St. Lawrence University: President

In an article I find myself returning to time and time again, entitled “How the Liberal Arts College Affects Students,” Alexander Astin, the Allan M. Cartter Professor of Higher Education at UCLA, writes, “Since residential liberal arts colleges tend to put a much greater emphasis on teaching than on research, the question arises: Does research have a significant place in the American liberal arts college? More specifically, does a significant emphasis on research and scholarship necessarily come at the expense of student development? Can research in the liberal arts college actually be used to enhance the educational process?”
To try to answer these questions, Astin and his colleagues analyzed 212 colleges and universities of all types and found that the higher the research orientation of the faculty, the lower the teaching orientation. This, or course, intuitively is something we think we know and don’t like about research universities.
Astin and his colleagues then wanted to know if there were any institutions whose faculties were simultaneously above average in both research and teaching orientations. There were about 20 among their institutional sample of 212, and they were all selective liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence.
The researchers also found that selective liberal arts colleges whose faculties are both research and teaching oriented are by far the most effective institutions of all kinds in accomplishing the academic and student development outcomes you and we work so hard for in our students. How does this happen?
One very important was is through student/faculty research, where faculty members serve as mentors to students and students become apprentices, doing the discipline and not just hearing about it. The faculty hold students to very high standards, because the faculty member’s work is at stake also, and students perform wonderfully, stretching and growing in ways they often did not imagine they could. It happens, in other words, because, St. Lawrence faculty very often “express” or “realize” their research orientation by involving students in it. Their research orientation actually becomes student-focused, and the potential conflict between research and teaching goes away. Students become collaborators with faculty in research.
National survey data show that St. Lawrence students participate in research with faculty member, or engage in research closely supervised by their professors, more frequently than do students at other selective liberal arts colleges. Recently, 65% of St. Lawrence seniors reported having worked with a faculty member on a research project, compared to 52% and 38% at other liberal arts colleges and the national sample of institutions as a whole.
Does all of this translate into student satisfaction with the St. Lawrence faculty and academic program? Recent surveys of our students indicate and emphatic “yes.” We have other data that show that St. Lawrence faculty is very active in scholarship in comparison to other national liberal arts college faculties. Our students are telling us that their professors are also highly teaching-oriented.
Our summer University Fellows Program (St. Lawrence, Summer/Fall 2000) was established to increase the already high levels of student/faculty research on campus. I have always believed that if we want students to become life-long learners, the faculty they look up to must be life-long learners. That is why we support faculty research, and especially faculty research with students as collaborators.
My goal is to support 100 Fellows in research with faculty each year. That would be extraordinary and wonderful-an outstanding community of learners on campus every summer, pushing their limits and forging the ideal undergraduate mentor/apprentice relationship. In this way St. Lawrence will maximize its impact on students, and the students who participate will have the educational time of their lives.