Winter 1999

About Students

St. Lawrence is, of course, entirely about students. There is a powerful history and tradition of student-centeredness here to which the faculty, the administration and staff, the trustees and our alumni are deeply committed.
I am committed to ensuring that we remain very student-centered as a University. It is important to us that students love this place, and that they leave here wanting to maintain the kind of lifelong relationship our alumni have with St. Lawrence.
But who are the students of today, nationally and at St. Lawrence? One source of data is a recent book by Alexander Astin, et al., entitled The American Freshman: Thirty Year Trends, 1966-1996. Since 1996, Astin and his colleagues at UCLA have been conducting a survey of freshmen at American colleges and universities, administered typically on the day they arrive on campus and completed by nearly all freshmen on each campus. St. Lawrence has participated in these studies from the start. They are an invaluable barometer of changing characteristics of students nationally and locally. Here are some key findings:

• Parents of college freshmen today have much more often been to college themselves, and therefore have become much more demanding consumers of higher education than were the parents of previous generations of students. They have also taught their children to be more demanding, and we see it on campus every day.
• Many fewer college freshmen today are from families where both parents are alive and living together. We therefore encounter greater needs on the part of students for counseling and other forms of personal support. In addition, we find a much higher percentage of current students caught between divorced parents when it comes to paying college bills. Stress on students from this source has increased significantly, and I believe this at least partly explains the somewhat lower graduation rates we and other college now experience.
• A major change is the long-term move by freshmen toward the political center from the left, and then, in 1981, a sharp division between men and women, with women moving back left of center and men to the right. We see this difference very clearly at St. Lawrence.
• There has also been a long-term decline in student idealism nationally, with aspirations to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” declining and to “be very well off financially” rising. Students are more cynical today, mirroring, I belief, society at large.
• Today’s students are far tougher on crime than were their predecessors.
• There has been a significant disengagement by students from academic work and from politics, and the most recent data show that freshmen entering in 1997 “exhibit higher levels of disengagement – both academically and politically – than any previous entering class of students.”
• Interest in social activism and service, after an increase from 1986 through 1992, has dropped off significantly.

The student generation of today is clearly different from other student generations, no matter which generation you talk about. Nationally, these data present a pessimistic picture. Though we see and experience these trends at St. Lawrence, there is also abundant and very encouraging counter-evidence that you find once you look not at survey data but at what specific students are making of the opportunities St. Lawrence has presented to them. Here are some examples, culled from the hundreds or reports of internships and volunteer experiences our students engaged in last year and over the summer:

• From a Tanner Fellowship proposal: “The number of destitute children and youth in Kenya has increased over the years due to lack of adequate social infrastructure to care for displaced children. These children find themselves forced to live in the streets where they fall into a life of crime. During this summer, I would like to contribute to the development and education of destitute children by working at Mukuru Promotion Center, a center for destitute children.” I could multiply many times over examples of this kind of outreach and service from St. Lawrence students participating in the Bosnia initiative and in other student initiatives.
• Another Tanner Fellowship proposal sough support for “hands-on experience in designing, building, testing, and using appropriate technological solutions to meet basic cooking, heating, and water purification/desalinization needs” as a contribution to the creation of a sustainable society.

We require all students studying on St. Lawrence international programs to do an internship. Many, at their own initiative, include some form or community service. Students on our Kenya Program:

• Participated in a study of nutrition and feeding patterns of mothers and infants in coastal Kenya to determine the need for nutritional assistance.
• Participated in an ecological study on fuelwood supply, utilization and consumption at the 40,000-person UN camp for Sudanese refugees at Kakuma, northwestern Kenya.
• Assisted a women’s cooperative in textile production and marketing, both nationally in Kenya and internationally, in developing global markets.

What one might call more “normal” internships, funded by the Vivien Hannon Internship Scholarship, included those at:

• New England Sports Network
• The Fredericksburg Theater Company working on costume design for three summer productions.
• The Donald Maass Literary Agency, run by Donald Maass ’75, reading submitted manuscripts and editing them.

These are not examples of students disengaged from social issues, uninterested in making a difference or lacking in ambition. These are St. Lawrence students, hundreds of them, making a difference all over the world, and I tell you that we are very, very proud of them. They are the young people who will mature into the leaders we see everywhere among our alumni.
Our job as a University is to see to it that this happens. Their presence among us justifies the intense student-centeredness of this place. It is true that we should never miss the forest by looking only at the trees, but to fail to see the trees and be gratified by the growth of each and every one of them is also a grave mistake.