Welcome back, and welcome again to our new faculty and staff. The day new
students arrive on campus is always a great day for me—new beginnings,
visible renewal of our commitment to excellence in liberal education, seeing
old friends and colleagues. It just feels good.
So let me start with some good news.
A first piece of good news is our admissions results
for this year, represented tangibly by the new students
we will see arriving today. Last year’s significant
application increase allowed us to admit a smaller
percentage. Our goal was a first-year class of 550.
But for the second year in a row, yield—the
percentage of acceptances who chose to enroll—exceeded
our expectations, and we should see some 610 new
students on campus today. I want to stress again
that this improvement in our situation is the result
of a broad-based, multi-dimensional improvement in
our attractiveness to prospective students rooted,
I believe, in the investments we are making in faculty,
program and facilities, the outstanding work of an
admissions and aid office that four years ago had
to be reconstituted and re-invigorated, and the wonderful
new spirit that is afoot here.
Some of you have wondered if housing
students is an issue this year, but overall enrollment
even with the large first-year class is about the
same as last year. Remember that our junior and senior
classes are abnormally small. Our strategy remains
to use any application growth we experience to improve
admissions selectivity—a goal critical to achieving
lots of other important things—and so next
year our goal will once again be to recruit and enroll
550 new students with even greater selectivity.
A second piece of good news involves our fund raising results for last year.
For the fourth year in a row we set an all-time record for total cash raised.
We raised over $16.1 million in cash last year, up from three straight years
of about $10 million. Again, almost none of it came unexpectedly from bequest
gifts through estates (you know the old saying: “You kick off, we receive!”).
It was raised the old fashioned way—prospect identification, cultivation
and solicitation by trustees, president, staff and hundreds of volunteers.
To be where we want to be we must do this and more every year—we must
regularly raise $15-$25 million in cash, about the mid-point of our comparison
group. To give you a sense of it, this year Bowdoin and Williams each raised
over $60 million, and DePauw University in Indiana raised over $300 million,
in cash, in one year! Those are daunting numbers, but I believe we can compete
with the strongest liberal arts colleges because we are doing very good and
interesting things very creatively here for and with students, and that,
ultimately, is what convinces donors that we are worth their investment.
Fund raising clearly must be a major preoccupation of mine—I spend
about 30% of my time at it—but I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy even more
seeing the results invested for students in the University.
There are three strategic issues
that we are going to need to consult about extensively
this fall, and I want to give you a “heads
up” about them this morning. Dealing with each
of these issues will require a separate consultation
process, about which you will hear more in the coming
days and weeks.
A Faculty and Staff Salary
Policy
This first issue is faculty and
staff salary policy. Recall that, after working much
of last year, and very intensively in the spring
semester, an on-campus group of faculty and administrative
staff, including me, presented a proposed new faculty
and staff salary policy to the trustees in May—a
policy which they accepted enthusiastically, contingent
on faculty and administrative staff acceptance also
this fall. Designed to ensure that over the next
five years achieving an ambitious salary goal will
be the top university budget priority, it does the
following:
The overall size of the salary pool,
but not individual salaries, is determined through
a formulaic calculation based on what our competitors’ salary
increases have been and will be, and based on changes
in St. Lawrence’s relative financial resources.
The proposed policy seeks to ensure that faculty
and staff achieve salary levels at least at the median
of the New Comparison Group.
It makes salaries the first charge
on the operating budget. And since the elements of
the formula used to calculate what the increase will
be are known earlier in the year, salary letters
should therefore be out in March.
This is not the place or time to
get into the proposed salary policy in detail, but
faculty and staff will have a chance to add their
input to that of the on-campus compensation group
this fall. The increase in the faculty and administrative
staff salary pool for 2001-02, as distinct from what
individuals will receive, has already been set at
5.45% as one result of last year’s discussions,
but beyond that year salary pool increases would
be decided automatically by formula. This is a significant
departure from past practice at St. Lawrence, and
we want to be sure people are comfortable with it.
We will need consultation in multiple venues, and
I’ll be asking the On-Campus Compensation Group
to work with me to organize that consultation.
Facilities Renovation and
Construction Priorities
As you know, we have embarked on
a very ambitious program of facilities renewal and
improvement—the result of a broadly consultative
facilities planning process we undertook in 1996-97
that led to a plan and set of priorities subsequently
approved by the trustees. We are now three years
into that program, and the reasons for taking projects
in the order we have—linked, I believe, closely
to priorities set in 1996-97 but not exactly the
same—are not always evident to faculty, staff
and students. Sometimes, for example, donors pick
a project for funding that, if we completely had
our way, might be lower on the priority list. And
other times, because projects may be linked in sequence,
a lower priority project in the abstract gets done
first because it’s in the way of a higher priority
project. An example would be the bookstore, where
because we wanted the land for another purpose on
which the old bookstore and health center sit, we
renovated Brewer for a new bookstore.
It’s time to serve up to the community for discussion the facilities
priorities and plans we are pursuing so that if there are good arguments
for changing direction we can think about doing that. Tom Coakley is preparing
a background paper which can and will be widely shared. It will form the
basis for this second significant consultation process.
You will remember from my May and
earlier post-board meeting memos, however, that the
trustees have declared a new student center, to be
located on the plot behind Piskor and Dana, to be
our next new facilities priority. We have begun to
raise money for that project, and a conceptual design
has been completed. Long on the University’s
list of priorities, its status as our next new project
is not up for reconsideration. We are actively seeking
restricted gifts that might allow us to undertake
other projects, e.g. the first phase of a multi-year
science facilities enhancement program, but all unrestricted
gifts of capital are being reserved for construction
of a new student center.
Look in the next weeks for structured opportunities to learn about what we’re
doing and what we think we should be doing so that you can get your oar in.
The Hewlett Cultural Audit
A third strategic issue that requires
broad-based discussion is the Cultural Audit completed
over last year and the summer by our Hewlett Foundation
Pluralism and Unity Grant Steering Committee, chaired
by Joe Kling and on which I sit. The purpose of the
audit was to explore in systematic fashion the challenges
St. Lawrence faces in its efforts to achieve a more
open and inclusive campus climate, and a broader
sense of community. It became, as we intended, a
candid institutional self-assessment, based on empirical
data from eight separate studies and reports, most
of which were already existing or done annually in
the normal course. Like other institutions of our
kind, that meant we had much information on the attitudes
and concerns of faculty and students, and little
on those of administrative and hourly staff. We think
what we have done so far is extremely valuable and
insightful, but a major defect is the somewhat ironic
insufficient inclusiveness of a major activity of
a project designed to foster inclusiveness. We have
more work to do, which will take time, but the committee
has decided we should not wait to share what we already
know.
And we think we learned much about
ourselves—some good news and some bad news—that
we can use to revitalize St. Lawrence’s commitment
to pluralism and foster a more open and inclusive
climate here for all. What must happen now is constructive
dialogue and reflection. The Hewlett Steering Committee
will be sponsoring and facilitating this dialogue
and reflection throughout the fall in a variety of
forums and venues. What I’m doing today is
giving you a “heads up.” This is a strategic
issue of critical importance to us all. When you
see an opportunity to participate in the dialogue,
take it.
Brown Bags for Faculty and Staff
One vehicle that I myself am going
to use to undertake dialogue with faculty and staff
on these and other strategic issues is a series of
brown bag lunch conversations with the president.
Three have already been set up for faculty, and I’ve
been in touch with Carolyn Filippi and Kim Robinson,
co-chairs of the Administrative Life Committee, to
arrange similar occasions for administrative staff.
The three faculty brown bag dates are: Wednesday,
September 15, from noon to 1:30 in the UC Formal
Lounge; Thursday, October 26, same time, same place;
and Friday, December 1, same time, same place. These
dates are already on the academic calendar that’s
been distributed, so you don’t need to remember
them. I’m providing the lunches, so you can
just come, pick one up and participate. In one or
more of these, there may be a short issue paper circulated
in advance. I’ll make some opening remarks,
laying out some issues and reporting on where we
are with them. And then we’ll have Q & A.
What I’m trying to do here is create a broader and more open set of
opportunities for faculty and staff in general, outside our normal committee
and meeting structure, to engage the president on matters of institutional
importance.
Conclusion
Let me say in conclusion that I
am really upbeat about the coming year and where
St. Lawrence is headed. There are competitor institutions
where right now our counterparts are wondering what
to do next. We’re doing it.
It’s grand to be here with
you. Thank you!
