Welcome back, and welcome again
to our new faculty and staff. I always find this
day when new students arrive on campus exhilarating.
It’s a fresh new beginning to the best work
in the world—work that I’m especially
proud and pleased to be doing here at St. Lawrence
with you.
Let me share with you some of the news from over the summer, almost all of
it good news:
The new student numbers for this year look like roughly 520 first-year students,
27 transfers, and very strong class quality. For example, 36% of the incoming
class graduated in the top 10% of their high school classes compared to 26%
last year. The new class will also require somewhat less financial aid than
we had planned. As you know, we struggle constantly to balance our commitment
to provide enough financial aid to enable all admitted students to afford
the cost of St. Lawrence with our need to attract enough strong students
who will pay our full comprehensive fee. This year almost 80% of our students
will receive need-based grant aid from us totaling over $25 million. With
this new class we are achieving a healthier balance. It means also that we
are becoming more and more competitive for students with many options.
While it’s not totally clear
yet what the net tuition revenue picture will be
relative to budget from these numbers, I suspect
we will come in slightly below our new student
budget target. It was predicated on 550 new first-year
students whom we expected to be more financially
needy than is the case with the students who enrolled,
but the declines in both cases do not offset each
other completely. At the same time, while last
year we admitted 69% of our applicants, this year
we admitted only 61%. That result was critical
to the improvements in class quality Terry Cowdrey
will describe more fully in her remarks at matriculation
this afternoon. We were very concerned not to have
a repeat of last year’s over-enrollment in
the first-year class. In retrospect, we were a
bit too cautious. All things combined, however,
this was a remarkable and highly positive admissions
year.
Campaign St. Lawrence officially
exceeded $100 million prior to the end of the fiscal
year, and total cash giving from private sources
was more than $16 million for the second straight
year. I’m pleased with where we are, but
very anxious to reduce the distance between $100
million and our $130 million goal soon. We have
16 months left to go and a bit over $25 million
to raise. It’s going to be a major preoccupation
of mine during that time.
We’ll be doing that while
a search for our next Vice President for University
Advancement is under way. I won’t dwell here
on what a loss it has been and will be not to have
Linda Pettit helping lead this charge. Her highly
competent and wonderful colleagues know how to
pull together, and will do so under Mike Archibald’s
very capable interim leadership. We will miss her
enormously, but we will get the job done.
As those of you who were here over
the summer know, we undertook an aggressive schedule
of facilities projects, ranging from the Newell
Field House and fitness center to the refurbishing
of Hulett and Jencks residence halls to the construction
of a new soccer field and the landscaping of the
area between Augsbury/Newell and Leckonby Stadium,
to be called Creasy Way in honor of the donor.
This coming year promises to be at least as busy,
if not more so:
We received a $1.5 million gift from the mother of a classmate of mine in
support of our senior townhouse project. Analysis and exploration of options
therefore continues at a fast pace. We hope to start construction on that
project next summer. And we’ll again spend roughly $1 million on the
refurbishing of additional student residential spaces.
Our student center architects have been on campus, working to ensure that
the project comes within budget and discussing alternatives for dealing with
the issue of the rifle range building, where all of our computing cable comes
together. It is still the plan to begin construction on that project next
summer. As the new student center is being constructed, planning will begin
for our intended re-allocation of Noble Center space for the arts.
With Board of Trustee Chairman
Emeritus Al Viebranz’s financial assistance
and useful encouragement, we are close to acquiring
a house for the Viebranz Visiting Writer-in-Residence.
A place for this important visitor and his or her
family to live and teach will be a wonderful addition.
We have compiled over the summer a list of qualified architects from which
we will select this fall a firm to work with us to plan new and renovated
facilities in science and mathematics. We should be deeply into the planning
for this project, which may take 5-7 years and $50-$60 million, by late fall.
Finally, having received gifts over the summer sufficient to cover fully
the construction cost, we have begun construction of a new baseball field.
Our facilities improvement needs
and our agenda for meeting them continue to be
ambitious. For many years we invested too little
in renovated and new facilities, but now we are
catching up.
One more piece of very good news
is that the Canton Day Care Center has received
informal word that its $750,000 proposal to the
State for funding of the construction of a new
day care facility has been approved. As some of
you know, St. Lawrence has been very involved in
seeking a first-rate solution to the day care facility
issue in town. Through the Canton Initiative we
have agreed to provide land for construction of
a new facility free of charge, next to the Edward
John Noble Medical Building, if it is needed (other
sites are also being explored). We have also agreed
to consider a cash capital contribution to supplement
the funding made available by the State, and will
work with the Canton Day Care Center to help ensure
that other local employers contribute as well.
Kathy Mullaney serves on the Canton Day Care Center
board. She has worked tirelessly to help move this
project along. Our willingness to provide the land
was very important in the State’s decision
to award a grant. I think we are finally about
to make some wonderful progress on an issue of
high importance to many, many St. Lawrence faculty
and staff.
I want to give you a “heads
up” today regarding several issues we’ll
need to consult with each other about during the
fall. In addition to regular meetings of Faculty
Council, the whole faculty, and the Administrative
Life Council, I’ll be holding three brown
bag lunches this semester with faculty and several
with administrative staff for discussion of these
and other issues. As we did last year, I’ll
get something to you in writing in advance so our
time together can be spent in discussion rather
than in imparting information you could just as
well have read ahead of time.
One issue, given that Tom Coburn completes his six-year term as Vice President
of the University and Dean of Academic Affairs at the end of this academic
year, will be the selection of our next Vice President and Dean from within
the faculty. The actual search and selection process won’t begin in
earnest until second semester, with Faculty Council serving as my search
committee. But many faculty members have expressed the desire for some discussion
of the role of the academic dean at St. Lawrence, the proper job description,
and the qualities we’d most like the successful candidate to have.
I plan to begin consultation on those matters after mid-semester break, and
have allocated one brown bag luncheon to it. Tom will be a very tough act
to follow, but in my view this faculty has a number of very strong candidates
in it. While I’m very sad to see Tom’s term end, I believe that
at this time next year we will be moving ahead with a very strong replacement.
A second issue has to do with what the now-quite-numerous educational outcomes
analyses we have been conducting at St. Lawrence are telling us about how
we’re doing with students. One especially interesting survey in which
our students participated last year was the National Survey of Student Engagement
(NSSE, for short). The researchers started by suggesting that we know a great
deal about what educational practices are most highly correlated with positive
educational outcomes of a wide variety of kinds. While it’s hard to
measure complex educational outcomes in all students in all colleges and
universities, it’s fairly easy to get students to tell you how often
they experience best educational practices in their courses.
The NSSE focused on first-year students and seniors. Some 63,000 students
in 276 colleges and universities completed surveys. About 40 of the 276 institutions
were liberal arts colleges, pretty equally divided among U. S. News and World
Report’s four tiers. As we examined the list of liberal arts college
participants, it looked quite representative.
We’ll read a paper summarizing the NSSE results prior to one of the
brown bags, but I can say today that our first-year student results were
outstanding in comparison to the total sample of 276 institutions and the
subset of liberal arts colleges. Our senior year results were not as good
but not terrible. I, at least, am drawing some tentative conclusions about
what we’re really good at here and what we will all likely want to
get better at, but I’d like to see what you’re reactions are.
You might read the data in very different ways.
Focusing attention on this kind of institutional research is timely because
we must begin this year our preparations for submitting a Middle States Periodic
Review Report (PRR) by June of 2003. Middle States requires a great deal
more in the way of systematic outcomes assessment than heretofore. I am pleased
about that, actually, because we have been positioning ourselves over the
past several years to do just that. An example, in addition to the National
Survey of Student Engagement, is the analysis of intercollegiate athletics
prepared for this summer’s trustee retreat at Canaras. That research
has been critical to helping us come to a pretty high—though not total
because every aspect of the University can always be better—comfort
level with our very strong program of intercollegiate athletics.
My hope is that the tri-partite Priorities and Planning Committee on campus
will agree to serve this time as the steering committee for our Middle States
PRR so that the outcomes assessment we will undertake as part of this exercise
will affect our university planning directly. While much more work than previous
PRR exercises, this change should be well worth it. My goal in this regard
is to try to make sure that is so.
There is much more that we could talk about this morning, but I’ve
taken a good deal of your time already. I am really upbeat about the coming
year and where St. Lawrence is headed. We’re doing lots of things right,
and the world is noticing. Since you are the ones doing these things, my
hat is off to you. It’s grand to be working on this good stuff with
you. Thank you!
