Spring 2003

Revisiting Lawry Gulick’s White Paper

Lawry Gulick, St. Lawrence’s 15th president, was cleaning out his files recently and came across some documents he thought we should have. Among them was a copy of his Directions for St. Lawrence University, prepared for the Board of Trustees in October of 1984. Faculty and trustees refer to it as “The White Paper.” It provoked a great deal of discussion and helped stimulate some faculty initiatives that are still playing themselves out today. The ideas in it were not his alone, I’m sure – such documents are always outcomes of ongoing conversations with faculty and of reading and contemplation on the sate of higher education generally and one’s own university specifically. They happen also when the time seems ripe for change.
I read this “White Paper” before I began my term as president, and again in my first years here, but had not picked it up in some time. So it was fortuitous for Lawry to send along another copy.
This issue of the magazine is about what makes for good teaching. Some of the features focus on individual professors and what they do that constitutes “good teaching.” But major pieces of Lawry’s paper are about how a university needs to be organized if good teaching is to happen – every day. I recall it from our collective memories here because great teaching universities have a culture of commitment to an ongoing, never-ending quest to get teaching and learning right. Their faculties talk about teaching constantly; this is happening here, as the article on the Center for Teaching and Learning demonstrates. They treat the implementation of innovations in teaching and learning as an iterative process of trial, assessment, reworking, new trial, new assessment – all highly focused on finding better ways to help our students experience a transforming undergraduate education in the liberal arts. Innovations begun in one era, if they continue to hold promise, take shape over years of such cycles of trial, assessment and reworking.
I believe Lawry should be pleased, when he sees the St. Lawrence of today, at how much of what was begun then is vital and alive today. Here are some examples out of many I might choose:
To bring academic and residential life closer together in a learning community, the “White Paper” advocated the founding of residential colleges within the University and commended the faculty for the development of East and New Colleges. Today, of course, all first-year students begin their St. Lawrence education by participating in the First-Year Program (FYP), a residentially based living/learning community focused on an interdisciplinary theme, and there are upperclass residential learning communities such as Commons College and Intercultural House where students living together are also taking a course together. Our overseas program in Kenya is another example: with the exception of homestays, our students live and learn together on the residential compound we own in Karen, and when in the field – in northern Tanzania, Samburu, on the coast – they are camping together. Our Adirondack Semester, about which you have read in these pages before, is yet another example. Theme houses, such as The Greenhouse, where students interested in environmental issues live together, abound. Academic life and residential life are knitted together at St. Lawrence as never before, but we are still in the midst of trial, assessment, reworking, new trial.
The Gulick paper challenged the faculty to give the senior year special attention. Today, every department and program must offer a Senior-Year Experience (SYE), and many departments and programs require them for completion of the major. In the words of a spring 2002 faculty resolution, the SYE involves “course work or independent projects undertaken in the senior year and designed to provide the means of integrating work done both inside and outside a student’s major.” SYEs, the resolution states, “will demand significant academic integration (and) actively engage students in the distinctively challenging ways that transcend those of regular course offerings.” I believe that within a few years all departments and programs will require an SYE of each of their majors.
Independent learning and internships were also a focus of the “White Paper.” Today, over half of all St. Lawrence students have completed at least one independent study course, over half by graduation have completed one or more off-campus internships (often paid) obtained through University programs or connections (often parents and alumni), many have participated in one or more service-learning courses, and about 35-40 students each year participate in research in collaboration with a faculty member either by competing successfully for one of the 20 University Fellowships we provide for summer study with a faculty member or through participation in research funded by a faculty research grant.
We know also that the most effective liberal arts colleges are those that are very demanding academically. When faculty expect a great deal of students, not surprisingly students deliver a great deal. And when a university is organized so that co-curricular and extracurricular life reinforce academic values, the high expectations of faculty are leveraged wonderfully. That too was a theme of the “White Paper,” and remains a daily commitment of St. Lawrence’s leaders and its faculty today.
I dwell on all of this not just to brighten the day of a predecessor – though I admit that I do not mind when others do that for me – but to show how a university is a dynamic, living, evolving organization that rightly goes about fundamental change slowly and cautiously. Too much is at stake for students for us to do it any other way. Trial, assessment, reworking, new trial – guided by an overarching educational philosophy and set of goals for student learning, within a powerful culture of commitment to helping students be transformed by their liberal arts education – is the way we think it must be. And so now some of the innovations of two decades ago are part of the foundation of a St. Lawrence education, and they help make it possible for the many faculty virtuosos of teaching and learning, some of whom are featured in this magazine, to work their magic.