To:                   The St. Lawrence Community

From:               Chair of the Board of Trustees Lawrence J. Winston

Date:                October 10, 2007

Subject:            Presidential Transition

President Daniel F. Sullivan has in a variety of venues been speaking informally, but with characteristic candor, about his plans to retire on June 30, 2009.  I write today to confirm officially that that is indeed his intention in a plan that he and we on the Board of Trustees have been discussing for some months and which I will share with you below.

As you know, Dan Sullivan began his tenure as our president—president of his own alma mater—on July 1, 1996.  In recent years, trustees have come to call this past decade the “St. Lawrence Renaissance” because, working together, we truly have brought great new life to this place we love so much.  He’s the first person among us to see and articulate the goals and challenges we still have, but what others see is eleven years of transforming accomplishment.

Dan’s goal always has been to make the student experience as academically demanding, as inspiring, as serious of purpose, as the very best students would expect of us while also focusing holistically on the full residential and co-curricular student experience and its impact on students’ overall development.  His work with every constituency group has kept students and their education as the central focus. He has urged his colleagues on the faculty and staff to consider their work as a vocation, with the dedication, the focus and the energy that the word “vocation” implies.  Ann and Dan Sullivan together have themselves been dedicated, focused and tirelessly energetic in their vocation with us. Their home has become a place of real community, and their travels have brought them to Laurentians throughout the world.  As a team, there has been none better and both deserve our deepest thanks. 

There will, of course, be a time to be more detailed about all of this as we get closer to an actual transition, and there is work to do to fill big shoes.  So let me describe for you the major features of the search process we will undertake, a first communication of many in what I and the Board intend to be an inclusive process.

Trustee Barry Phelps ’69 has agreed to chair the Search Committee, and I express my thanks to him for what will be a very important and intensive assignment.  The Search Committee will include faculty, administrators, students and alumni, although we have not yet worked through the details of naming specific people to participate. We plan to have the Search Committee formed by the end of the fall semester.

We will work with a professional search consultant to build the pool of candidates, will interview potential consultants in October, and hope to name the consultant by the end of October.  I expect that one or more faculty leaders will join trustees in these interviews.

The work of the consultant and search committee will ramp up to full effort as the spring 2008 semester begins.  By the middle of the fall 2008 semester the committee will narrow its focus to one or more finalists who will visit campus for an intensive engagement with us.  It’s our plan for the Board to name a new president in the late fall of 2008, and President Sullivan will work with his successor, and with my own successor as chair of the Board, Donald Rose ’64, to achieve a smooth and effective June 30, 2009 transition.

Please join the Board of Trustees, and all Laurentians, in this first expression of gratitude to Dan and Ann Sullivan.  Please know that we will keep you apprised as the search progresses.

Many thanks.