St. Lawrence University: President

Last Word - Spring 2009
Reflections

In this, my last column for the magazine as president, I want to reflect a bit—I hope not too sentimentally—on some things I hope all of us who are involved in shaping St. Lawrence’s present and future might keep in mind about who we are—how we’re wired, if you will—and what works for us as we seek continuous improvement in what we are able to provide for some of the best college students anywhere. St. Lawrence transforms students in the most wonderful way. Here are some of the reasons why I believe that is so.

How We’re Wired
The St. Lawrence of today is shaped profoundly by the values and commitments of its founders. Even though, as is true of every human institution, we have not always been able to realize our best self in every way historically, our striving has been for the right things.

From our Universalist founders we inherited commitments to inclusiveness, fairness, equity and equality. Our founders believed that all people are God’s children.

As with the America in which we live, which has struggled since its founding to live up to the ideals expressed most clearly in the Declaration of Independence but is drawn inexorably back to pursuit of them even when it strays, with time these values do and must win out at St. Lawrence. We proclaim, for example, that St. Lawrence ordained Olympia Brown as the first woman Protestant minister in America. But the men who ran our theological school in the 1860s made it very, very tough for her, as did her Universalist denomination subsequently. They did, however, let her through despite their worries that a woman could never be a successful minister, and she did have a profound impact throughout her career as a minister and writer. Jeffrey Campbell was in 1933 our first African-American graduate, and he too was ordained after attending our theological school. We rightly celebrate this, but Campbell (as we shared with you in the Winter 2006 magazine) also struggled to overcome the prejudices of University leaders who nonetheless, in the end, lived up to their and our values.

Among highly selective liberal arts colleges we have among the highest percentages of students receiving federal Pell Grants—20%—reflecting our ongoing commitment to having a student body that is very diverse socio-economically. Pell Grant recipients come from families with incomes in the lowest 25% of the nation’s family income distribution.

These are examples among many I could select of the consequences of our wiring for inclusiveness, fairness, equity and equality. When we do get to the right place in these areas, it feels naturally right to us because of our founding values.

Our location in the North Country has, I have long believed, wired into us a strong work ethic and a lack of pretense. There is nothing snooty about the North Country. There is instead a kind of honesty and straightforwardness that I have always found refreshing, and a pride in our North Country location combined with a global reach. We live in the St. Lawrence Valley, in the shadow of the Adirondacks to the south and east. The river corridor has for centuries made our part of North America an intercultural and now international melting pot. We therefore expect—take for granted even—that an education worth having is also an intercultural, international, global education.

This North Country University has known from the very start that nothing good happens without hard work. We do not expect that anything will be handed to us. I find sometimes a kind of complacence in some of our wealthiest competitors, at least with regard to how to accomplish continuous quality improvement in undergraduate liberal education. These institutions—especially in the Northeast—are always members of but infrequently participants in the programs of leading organizations for excellence in liberal education such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL), the national network focused on improvement and reform of undergraduate science and mathematics education, whose boards I have chaired. It’s almost like “don’t screw it up” is the strategic plan. The faculty culture at St. Lawrence, on the other hand, is about lifelong learning of new ways to better accomplish the liberal education learning goals to which we are so deeply committed. That makes me very proud.

I see all of these values present essentially from the start in our history and traditions. They are part of who we are and why we remain so relevant today, so well-tuned to provide the kind of education our students need for the 21st century and beyond.

What Works for Us
At the same time, today’s St. Lawrence would be totally unrecognizable in hundreds of ways to those who gave birth to us in the middle of the 19th century, five years before the Civil War. We have changed a lot, not always easily. What I have tried to recognize, though, is that sometimes profound necessary changes in an institution can happen much more easily if they are essentially about “going home” rather than “going away.” Suggesting to faculty, staff, alumni and trustees that the University must change into something new, something fundamentally different from what it has been, is never an easy sell.

Colleges and universities in America are deeply conservative, mostly for good reasons. Suggesting, on the other hand, that the very same changes need to be made so that we can come closer to realizing the fervent vision of our founders—our nature, if you will—is quite another thing. St. Lawrence has changed a great deal on my watch, but I think those changes have felt natural rather than alien.

Another thing that has worked for us is thinking systemically. St. Lawrence is first and foremost an academic institution. That means that the faculty does and should have a powerful impact on our programs and also our strategic direction, and student academic learning is our number one priority.
But we are also a holistic residential learning community with learning goals for students that are not narrowly academic. We know, therefore, that we must understand the interconnections among all of our parts and the ways in which everything we do affects student learning outcomes. And we know that change is never linear—there are positive and negative feedback loops among our system’s parts that we have to appreciate if we are going to accomplish our goals. As a result we are always pursuing several interrelated initiatives simultaneously, never one thing at a time. Planning is dynamic and ongoing and it benefits from systematic assessment and self-study.

For years, St. Lawrence, led by its faculty, has been committed to creating an environment for engaged, active learning by students through the use of what we in higher education have come to call “high-impact practices.” Here are some examples:

students interact with faculty members frequently, not just in class;
students are expected to write a great deal and display higher-order thinking skills, and their professors take their writing seriously and provide prompt, detailed feedback;
students are also expected to develop higher-order rhetoric and oral communication skills suitably tuned to the communities of learning within which they participate through frequent oral communication assignments also involving detailed feedback—talking chemistry is different from talking literary criticism;
students collaborate with one another in various kinds of structured exercises—the faculty do not leave to chance getting students to influence and challenge each other;
students actively seek to learn from the diverse perspectives other students bring with them and faculty organize how and where this kind of learning can happen;
students have many opportunities to study in another culture through widely available programs of overseas study;
students can undertake a serious piece of research, scholarship or artistic creation under the mentorship of a faculty member, often multiple times in a four-year St. Lawrence career;
students work on real-world problems, both on campus in conjunction with their classes and in internships outside the University.

In addition to “professing” in the traditional sense, in this kind of learning environment faculty mentor, guide and develop students. Research in the last decade has shown clearly that these “high-impact practices” produce deeper, more long-lasting learning. St. Lawrence is deeply committed to all of this—it has worked for our students in the most wonderful ways.

Finally, let me also say that what has worked for us is recognition that we exist for the purpose of providing a transforming liberal education for our students. All that we do, from seeking to hire and retain outstanding faculty teacher-scholars, committed to their own lifelong learning so that they can inspire the same commitment in their students, to our co-curricular and residential programs, has our students’ education squarely in the forefront. None of this is new to St. Lawrence under my presidency. I have, rather, had the opportunity to seek to sustain and nurture it. What fun it has been!

It has been such a special pleasure, as an alumnus of St. Lawrence, to serve the University in a leadership role these past thirteen years. It has in every way been a vocation, not a job, and almost daily I am humbled by the sheer excellence I see around me in my faculty and staff colleagues. President-elect Bill Fox ‘75, I know, truly gets all of this. How lucky we are that he and we have found each other just now.