REMARKS OF WELCOME TO NEW STUDENTS AND PARENTS
MATRICULATION CEREMONY
Daniel F. Sullivan – Monday,
August 28, 2006
Members
of the Class of 2010, 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 151st class to enter St. Lawrence since our founding
in 1856—the first after our sesquicentennial! 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 2010’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 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. Joseph
Tolliver, Vice President and Dean, who with his 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. Jon Cardinal, 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.” I
looked over as I was reading Friedman’s book at my
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 fourth-grader has had some fine early science education
despite what we’re reading these days about K-12 science
education in America! 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.
On this latter issue Friedman 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 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, migrates
well beyond national boundaries and therefore affects 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, those nation-states
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 and
treat not just my illness but me as a valued person, 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 (try Geraldine
Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March if
you haven’t read it already), 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
everything 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 2010, 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!
Dean
Cowdrey, you may now present the class to the faculty!
Once again,
let me say how great it is to have you here on this spectacular North Country
day. Before we adjourn, I have a few announcements:
- The Family Orientation Program is now concluded. Thank
you for attending.
- First-year students: at the conclusion
of the alma mater, I will ask you to stand and move toward
the center aisle. As Dean Tolliver and Associate
Dean Horwitz recess up the aisle, please fall in behind
them to march out. You should then meet by your college’s
sign in the grove of trees near Herring-Cole.
- Parents: please remain in your seats
until after the recessional. You may then join your
sons and daughters at their college sign in the grove of
trees near Herring-Cole to say “good-bye” before
they move to their next event.
And now please welcome the incomparable Laurentian Singers,
led by Barry Torres!
Thomas
L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of
the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2005)
David
J. Lynch, “Pollution poisons China's progress,” USA
Today, July 5, 2005.
