REMARKS OF WELCOME TO NEW STUDENTS AND PARENTS
MATRICULATION CEREMONY
Daniel F. Sullivan – Monday, August 22, 2005

Members of the Class of 2009, other new students, and your parents and families—a warm welcome to St. Lawrence University. We have been looking forward to your arrival for months. You are the 150th class to enter St. Lawrence in this, our sesquicentennial year! We are ready for you and anxious to get to know you. You new students are a remarkable group—expansive of mind, serious of purpose, generous in spirit, curious, creative, and warm-hearted. What fun we will have together in your time at St. Lawrence.
This matriculation ceremony marks the formal beginning of the Class of 2009’s St. Lawrence experience. In our program, Teresa Cowdrey, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid and the person who leads the group who selected you from the second largest applicant pool in the history of the University, presents the new class to the faculty and staff. Dean Cornwell will accept you on behalf of the University and introduce and recognize two key colleagues: Prof. Steven Horwitz, Associate Dean of the First Year, and Dr. Margaret Kent Bass, Vice President and Dean, who with her staff is responsible for student life. At the conclusion of this ceremony, you will be in their hands. They will teach you, learn with you, and help you discover how to live together in a learning community. Adam Casler, President of the Thelomathesian Society, St. Lawrence’s student government, will also give words of greeting.
“The World is Flat,” said Tom Friedman in what he calls his best-selling “brief history of the twenty-first century.” When I looked over as I was reading Friedman’s book this summer at my 8-year old grand-daughter and said: “Caitlin, did you know that the world is flat?” She said: “Oh grandpa, you’re silly. I’ve seen the pictures from outer space. They show clearly that the world is round.” The good news is that at least one American third-grader has had some fine early science education! The bad news is that, in the ways in which he means it, Friedman is surely right and there are profound consequences.
The way in which Friedman thinks the world is flat is that information technology and the internet have leveled the playing field for smart, well-educated people in countries like China, Pakistan, India, Thailand, and elsewhere to compete successfully for work and jobs that used to be done here in the United States and other advanced economies. While a smaller percentage of the populations of those countries have the education to compete, their populations are so large that their absolute number is increasingly large relative to their equivalents in the U. S., so they are already a major economic force. And they less and less often need to come to the U. S. for advanced education because their own universities are growing larger and stronger (though, as usual, we have a wonderful group of international students enrolling at St. Lawrence today). In addition, they are hungry for success, and Friedman says U.S. college students and graduates more and more exhibit the lack of motivation and drive that often accompanies affluence. There are good data that show that American college students—the most privileged college students anywhere because they attend college in the world’s best system of higher education—work far less in college than their counterparts in the developing world, feeling assured at the outset that a prime place has been reserved for them in an affluent future. In the global economy of the near future, Friedman worries, America will be outhustled.
Friedman also conveys powerfully the increasingly relentless and exponentially growing pace of global economic markets. The rationality of the market, he is saying, increasingly overwhelms all other rationalities—we cannot survive by falling behind in the competition, but on the flip side it’s pretty clear that we will not survive if the market comes to govern all things.
He reports on a visit he made to see Michael Sandel, the distinguished Harvard political theorist, to try his ideas of the flattening world out on him. Sandel surprised him by saying that the first real description of the flattening world is in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. “While the shrinking and flattening of the world that we are seeing today constitute a difference of degree from what Marx saw happening in his day,” said Sandel, “it is nevertheless part of the same historical trend Marx highlighted in his writings on capitalism—the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce.” “Marx considered it inevitable that capital would have its way—inevitable and also desirable. Because once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx thought, it would lay bare the stark struggle between capital and labor. Forced to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression. Deprived of consoling distractions such as patriotism and religion, they would see their exploitation clearly and rise up to end it.”
Is that, Friedman asks later in the book, really where the exponential growth of global capitalism is taking us? How do we capture some of the benefits of having work done where it is most efficient in the world for it to be done without reducing ourselves to Marx’s vision? Sandel responded that “a flat, frictionless world is a mixed blessing. . . . . From the first stirrings of capitalism, people have imagined the possibility of the world as a perfect market—unimpeded by protectionist pressures, disparate legal systems, cultural and linguistic differences, or ideological disagreement. But this vision has always bumped up against the world as it actually is—full of sources of friction and inefficiency. Some obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste and lost opportunities. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect non-market values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride. . . . That is why the debate about capitalism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barriers, and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect.”
In addition, as countries taking advantage of the increasingly flat world seek to bring higher levels of prosperity to their people in the short term, they frequently discount the environmental and health side-effects of the manufacturing processes and other technologies they adopt. USA Today this summer reported in an article about China that perhaps as much as 15% of China’s GDP is being spent dealing with the health consequences of China’s growing industrial pollution, some of which, like air pollution and global warming, migrate well beyond national boundaries and therefore affect ours and others’ quality of life.
So, what you, America’s new generation, are about to prepare to enter and confront is a global economy characterized by relentless, exponentially growing competition that threatens a global race to the bottom with regard to ultimate quality of life. And as economic activity increasingly transcends the physical boundaries of nation-states, they become less and less able to assert values and enforce controls over how the competition will be conducted. Yet you, and we, must find ways to assert and enforce values other than those of the market if we are to be fully human. That’s what the liberal arts education you have come to St. Lawrence to pursue is ultimately for.
But what is liberal education? The faculty of the University has spent a great deal of time making clear the aims and objectives of a liberal education that we think are central. You will be discussing them in your first-year colleges. They describe what we will be about together in the next four years:
A liberal education requires breadth, depth and integration in learning. It also requires the cultivation of those habits of intellectual and moral self-discipline that distinguish a mature individual. To these ends, St. Lawrence seeks to provide an education that fosters in students an open, inquiring and disciplined mind, well informed through broad exposure to basic areas of knowledge; an enthusiasm for life-long learning; self-confidence and self-knowledge; a respect for differing opinions and for free discussion of those opinions; and an ability to use information logically and to evaluate alternative points of view.
A liberal education frees students from the confines of limited personal experiences and limited knowledge of the physical, historical, social and cultural world. In return, this liberation gives an enlightened understanding of that which is singular, immediate and limited. Thus, a liberal education is always relevant to the world in which students must live at the same time that it attempts to maintain a certain detachment from that world.
The kind of education we’re describing in these aims and objectives is the kind of education I want those who are tackling the world’s tough issues on my behalf to have: the diplomat who seeks to contribute to peace in the Middle East, the physician who is going to diagnose my illness, the mother and father who are going to bring children into the world and help them grow, the lawyer who is an advocate but also knows and pursues justice, the novelist whose insight will help me understand the human condition better, the manufacturer who is not just good at making things but who also cares about the lives of his or her workers and the environmental impact of his or her manufacturing processes and products, and, most importantly, the person who can use the global market economy to help produce greater overall world wealth and standard of living in an environmentally sustainable way and in a way that also preserves and enhances our ultimate humanity. The kind of education we’re about at St. Lawrence is not just important—it is absolutely essential and totally practical: it is a means to the end of making a powerful and positive difference in a world that has never been more challenging or complex.
It is also not easily won, if it is truly going to stand you well in the kind of world Friedman has described. We are the most affluent society in the history of the world. Affluence really does breed a feeling of entitlement, but you are not entitled to the kind of education I’ve been discussing. You have to earn it; you have to work hard for it. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that the future of America and the world depends on you not feeling entitled, on your willingness and commitment to absorb all you can and grow as far and as fast as you can—to use the rich resources of this university in the most transforming way possible.
We are ready to do our very best for you. We’re going to be academically demanding and provide you with a rich array of academic opportunities, but we’re also going to give you hundreds of opportunities to develop yourselves in ways other than just the intellectual, so that you will be able and courageous enough, we hope, to introduce and support just the right frictions in the world economic marketplace—those that preserve and extend our humanity. It is my deepest hope that you will leave St. Lawrence having been challenged powerfully, and that you will have met the challenge. If this works the way we intend it, you will also leave St. Lawrence loving this place in a way that will last a lifetime. You will have been affected profoundly, and your attachment to St. Lawrence will be permanent and deeply meaningful.
So we welcome you, the Class of 2009, with the greatest enthusiasm. You are well prepared. We know you can do what is necessary to succeed here, and of course we know that you have chosen a marvelous university. You have my best and most heartfelt wishes as you begin this journey! Thank you!