REMARKS OF WELCOME TO NEW STUDENTS AND PARENTS
MATRICULATION CEREMONY
Daniel F. Sullivan – Monday, August
27, 2007
Members
of the Class of 2011, 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 152nd class to enter St. Lawrence since our founding
in 1856! 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 2011’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 by far the
largest applicant pool in the history of the University, presents
the new class to the faculty and staff. Dean Lehr will accept you on behalf of the
University and introduce and recognize two key colleagues: Prof. Catherine
Crosby-Currie, 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. Jasper Burch, President of the Thelomathesian Society,
St. Lawrence’s student government, will also give words of greeting.
If
you came to campus last spring for one of our admitted student
visit days you heard me say that “the education you would
receive at St. Lawrence is ‘in the liberal arts.’ It
is not professional education, or technical education, or vocational
education—it is education for a life, education that inspires
students to be lifelong learners, education that prepares students
to make a difference in a wide array of careers, education that
encourages students to find meaning in what they do, and to better
understand the great issues and questions that are at the center
of the quest to be a learned, educated person.” I
told you that only 3% of American colleges and universities have
education in the liberal arts as their primary mission, so you
would become part of a very special tradition—and now you
have! A warm congratulations! It’s terrific
to see you here with us on this great day.
But I’d
like to say some more to you about liberal education as you get ready to begin
your time at St. Lawrence. Recently, Ann and I viewed an hour-long PBS
program on dyslexia, and one of the points it made has a clear parallel to
liberal education: “Until universal literacy became a requirement
for even minimal participation in American society, dyslexia—a learning
disability of neurological origin which causes difficulty with reading and
writing—remained undiscovered.” When it became critical for
everyone to be able to read, the incentive grew to understand why a substantial
group—some say as many as 10% of the population—of otherwise intelligent
persons had enormous difficulties in learning to read.
In many
respects an analogous situation applies to our need for liberal
education in the world of today. Industrial societies need vast numbers of factory
workers to do routine, repetitive tasks that do not involve such things as
analysis, synthesis, teamwork and problem-solving, high-level written and communication
skills, critical and creative thinking, intercultural knowledge and competence,
quantitative literacy and information literacy. Managers, leaders and
professionals need such skills in industrial society, but they are a relatively
small fraction of the workforce. As manufacturing evolves from “mass
production” technology to “continuous process” technology,
where much of product creation and assembly are done by machines and robots
that workers monitor, adjust and repair, and where labor costs are a smaller
fraction of overall production costs, factory workers also increasingly
need the advanced skills I note above. Manufacturing that is still best
done in a “mass production” way, as we know, moves to less developed
societies. In manufacturing involving continuous process technology,
the fraction of employment that is managerial and technical grows while the
fraction devoted directly to production declines.
As the manufacturing
sector of an advanced economy becomes smaller in terms numbers
of workers employed and the services sector grows, those high-level
skills are in even greater demand. This is so even in traditional blue-collar service jobs—the
complexity of today’s plumbing and electrical systems, for example, also
requires plumbers and electricians who can analyze, synthesize, problem-solve
and communicate.
In short,
just as dyslexia was “discovered” when universal literacy became
a basic societal necessity, liberal education is being “discovered” in
new ways as the skills, habits of mind and personal attributes we associate
with a liberally educated person become more and more necessary for almost
any kind of work and life in a modern society like ours—indeed, an almost
universal necessity.
That is the basic premise of “Liberal Education
and America’s
Promise (LEAP),” an exciting decade-long initiative of
the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
begun in 2005, its 90th anniversary year. For several years
I have been on the board of AAC&U, and this year I am chair-elect
and will become chair in January 2008. AAC&U, with
over 1,100 colleges and universities of every type and size in
its membership, is “the only major higher education association
whose sole focus is the quality of student learning in the college
years,” and the only association devoted to fostering liberal
education. LEAP’s core principle is that not only
should liberal education be the central focus of post-secondary
education of all types, but that it should also be the primary
focus of K-12 education—our “education for all”—as
well. It is not just for students planning to go to college. To
repeat, today’s “vocational” education must
also be liberal education, for success in what we have historically
called “blue-collar work” is also dependent on acquiring
the skills, habits of mind and forms of personal commitment of
the liberally educated person.
There is
growing evidence that the American public gets this—you have,
obviously. At our January AAC&U meeting we released the
results of a major survey of American business leaders—mostly chief executive
officers of companies of a variety of sizes—and recent
college graduates. Let
me quote from the report to summarize the findings:
Employers and recent college graduates reject a higher education
approach that focuses narrowly on providing knowledge and skills
in a specific field; majorities instead believe that an undergraduate
college education should provide a balance of a well-rounded
education and knowledge and skills in a specific
field.They
particularly emphasize the importance of providing students with .
. . .experience putting [their] knowledge and skills to practical
use in “real-world” settings. Large majorities of employers think that colleges and universities
should place more emphasis on:
- Integrative learning, including the ability to apply knowledge
and skills to real-world settings through internships or other
hands-on experiences.
- Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural
world, including concepts and new developments in science and
technology; global issues and developments and their implications
for the future; the role of the United States in the world;
and cultural values and traditions in America and other countries.
- Intellectual and practical skills, such as teamwork skills
and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group
settings; the ability to communicate effectively orally and
in writing; critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills;
the ability to locate, organize and evaluate information from
multiple sources; the ability to be innovative and think creatively;
the ability to solve complex problems; and quantitative reasoning.
- Personal and social responsibility, including knowledge of
global issues and developments and their implications for the
future; and a sense of integrity and ethics.
The survey also indicates that there is an increasing national
recognition of the importance of science and mathematics education,
both as a key element of liberal education and because of the
critical contribution science and mathematics education plays
and will play in making possible the technological and other
innovations necessary to produce a growing world economy that
is also environmentally sustainable. Of course, St. Lawrence
and the rest of the nation’s selective liberal arts colleges
got this long ago. Selective liberal arts colleges, for
over a half-century, have produced 2.5 to 3 times as many baccalaureate
degrees in science and mathematics as research universities and
other kinds of undergraduate institutions on a proportional basis: typically
from 25-40% of their graduates. The only problem is that
the total enrollments of the top 60 American liberal arts colleges
can fit comfortably in the University of Michigan’s football
stadium! We are way out ahead, we are too few to change
the big picture by ourselves, but we can be a beacon of leadership
to help the rest of the nation catch up.
The kind of education we have in mind for you is the kind of
education I want those who are tackling the world’s toughest
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, 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. 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. It is my deepest hope that
you will be challenged powerfully here, 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 2011, 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 your journey! Thank you!
Dean Cowdrey,
you may now present the class to the faculty!
Peter
D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., “How Should Colleges
Prepare Students to Succeed in Today’s Global Economy?” Conducted
on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities,
December 28, 2006.
