The Last Word
On Student Research

The very best way to describe what we do at St. Lawrence is to say that we are a community of learners—a community that facilitates and achieves learning in the liberal arts.  We know from our own experience and years of national research on student outcomes that the best way to be such a community is to expect every student to do serious research with or under the close guidance of a committed faculty member in a mentor/apprentice relationship. 

Why is this kind of endeavor so central to our mission?  Because in research, students are actively involved in the project of creating knowledge, not just absorbing or passing on what is already known. This kind of teaching and learning environment is intense, requires a low student/faculty ratio, and is expensive.  It is also efficient because students attending colleges with such environments graduate at very high rates--student retention is very high.  Viewed in this way, with a properly educated graduated senior as the goal, a St. Lawrence education becomes competitive in cost because there is so much less waste in the system.

This issue of the magazine illustrates several student and student/faculty research projects so you can see for yourself the fascinating work our students do and appreciate the many forms research takes and the many highly personal educational outcomes it produces—outcomes that will last, and students will remember, for a lifetime. 

A wise friend of mine once said, “You’re never educated until you’re dead!”  That was his way of describing one of St. Lawrence’s most important educational goals:  we seek to help our students become lifelong learners who are curious, always expanding their interests and their knowledge, and well prepared with the analytical, judgmental and communication skills to do so at a very high level.

It follows naturally that, for our students to become lifelong learners, our faculty must model for them the qualities of mind and the ongoing curiosity necessary to discover new things.  They too must be lifelong inquirers who test their ideas and findings in their disciplinary communities of scholars by subjecting those ideas to the criticism of peers.  They must make their work public and, in our environment, whenever possible bring students along as they do so.

St. Lawrence is not a research university.  We are a liberal arts university devoted to providing an excellent and truly demanding education to some of the nation’s best undergraduate students.  At the same time, our mission, because of the modeling for students that we must achieve, requires the same kind of commitment to scholarship (including very importantly the scholarship of the arts) in the faculty that one finds in institutions with a research mission.  Put another way, faculty cannot mentor excellent students in meaningful research if they, themselves, do not have an active program of inquiry.  Nurturing this requires of us a commitment to support faculty scholarship commensurate with our expectations of faculty.  That is why our faculty will tell you that St. Lawrence provides outstanding financial support for their research, and for travel to present their work to national and international peers.

Our approach to liberal education requires that faculty engage students both in and outside the classroom.  We know from a large national survey completed every few years by the faculties of most of our liberal arts competitors that the St. Lawrence faculty, on average, commit just under 50 hours per week to their St. Lawrence duties—a full half-day more than the faculties of our highly selective competitors.  Most of that difference comes from the greater commitment St. Lawrence faculty have to engaging students in just the ways we hope.  At the same time this survey shows that St. Lawrence faculty produce published scholarship of all kinds at the same rates as faculty at highly selective liberal arts colleges, most of which are wealthier than St. Lawrence and can afford to give their faculty members a lower number of classes to teach.

Next time you are in Brewer Bookstore, look at the Faculty Books section.  There you will find well over 60 books, including these very recent titles: Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction, by Professor of English Peter Bailey; Corridos in Migrant Memory, by Assistant Professor of Global Studies Martha Chew Shanchez; Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships Between Exotic Dancers and Regulars, by Associate Professor of Gender Studies Danielle Egan; and Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, by Professor of Canadian Studies Robert W. Thacker. 

And if you explore our Web site as faculty describe their research, you will find examples like this citation that includes Associate Professor of Biology Joe Erlichman:  “Hewitt, A., Barrie, R., Graham, M., Bogus, K., Leiter, J.C. and Erlichman, J.S. (2004). Ventilatory effects of gap junction blockade in the RTN in awake rats.” In press American Journal of Physiology 287:R1407-R1418.” The first four co-authors were St. Erlichman’s students; Joe has had 19 different student co-authors on his papers in the past five years.  The absolutely best way to learn science is to do science in a serious way, with students taking increasing responsibility as their knowledge and skills develop over their four years at St. Lawrence.

Daniel F. Sullivan, President