To: The St. Lawrence Community
From: Chair of the Board Donald K. Rose
Date: December 18, 2008
Subject: Honors for President and Mrs. Sullivan
The St. Lawrence Board of Trustees will confer two important honors on President Daniel F. Sullivan and Ann H. Sullivan on the occasion of their retirement. The first recognizes the Sullivans’ commitment to mentored and/or collaborative student-faculty scholarship, including creative expression in the arts, and the second commemorates their dedication to the development of quality and purpose in the extra-curricular life of St. Lawrence students.
The Dan and Ann Sullivan Funds for Student-Faculty Scholarship will be the overarching name for a collection of funds supporting student-faculty research and student-faculty work in the arts during the academic year and in the summer. Support for projects from these funds will be available to all students and faculty on a competitive basis, as is the case today with the University Fellows Program. Students participating in a project funded from this source will be named Sullivan Fellows. St. Lawrence has a number of such funds in place thanks to generous alumni, parent and friend donors; one of the funds is the new Daniel F. ’65 and Ann H. Sullivan Endowment for Student-Faculty Research, a University Fellows endowment for summer research projects. I’m thrilled to announce that 100% of the Board of Trustees and 100% of the Alumni Executive Council have made a gift to the Sullivan Endowment Fund.
We believe that applying an all-embracing name to all of the funds that support collaborative student-faculty scholarship honors a deeply cherished value that the Sullivans have espoused throughout their time at St. Lawrence. All future teams of student-faculty scholars can honor the Sullivans just by doing what students and faculty do best: work together to challenge the boundaries of established thought and blaze new pathways in artistic and creative achievement and research.
The second thread of the dual honors will become effective May 2009, when a Commencement weekend dedication takes place. St. Lawrence’s Student Center will become the Sullivan Student Center.
From his days as a student worker in the basement of E.J. Noble University Center, overseeing a pool room, ping pong room, and bowling alleys, President Sullivan has understood the power of place in the life of students. When they arrived back on campus in 1996, Dan and Ann saw and appreciated the need to create a new space on campus where students could live, eat, study, meet, and play. The Sullivans believe that student life outside the classroom is as important to the college experience as life within the classroom; so they spent much of their first leadership years listening, planning and raising support for a new student center that would transform student life at St. Lawrence.
St. Lawrence’s campus center truly has been redefined and transformed thanks to the leadership of Dan and Ann Sullivan. The Student Center has become the heart of campus, pulsing with the energy of ideas, the power of commitment and the vigor of relationships with fellow Laurentians. The Board of Trustees wishes to name this facility the Sullivan Student Center to honor two Laurentian leaders whose legacy should be and will be remembered and honored always.
