Remarks—Town/Gown Reception
Sunday, December 14, 2003 —Daniel F. Sullivan
A warm welcome to you all. This annual reception is something
we do to celebrate the wonderful, old, deep, and vitalizing
relationship St. Lawrence has with the community in which we
live. Though this reception is something of a tradition, five
years ago John Clark ‘69 brought a terrific new idea
to it—the idea that we should use this special time together
to identify and celebrate outstanding St. Lawrence alumni with
strong connections to this village, town, and area of the North
Country.
The picture boards you see mounted permanently on the walls
in the side rooms to my left and right are from 1999, 2000,
2001and 2002. Those on display in this room today are John’s
latest creations. The new ones for this year recognize Charles
Snow Brewer (Class of 1891), Phyllis Forbes Clark (Class of
1912), Frederic Schiller Lee (Class of 1878), Helen Probst
Abbott (Class of 1901), and Charles Hazen Russell (Class of
1869). I hope you’ve had a chance to look at them all
and read the captions, or if you haven’t, that you will
take the time before leaving here today. All of them should
make us proud. Their North Country backgrounds are so like
our North Country students of today, and their local and world
accomplishments will, I’m sure, be matched by accomplishments
of North Country students we have on campus today.
Our music is by The Trillium String Trio—Agnes McCarthy,
John Jadlos, and Christian Hosmer. Please give them a round
of applause.
Our Sesquicentennial
Our focus on the history of the relationship between St.
Lawrence and the Village and Town of Canton at this annual
reception has me this year thinking also about the sesquicentennial
of the University. The University received its charter in April
of 1856. We have chosen to designate academic year 2005-06
as our sesquicentennial year and have begun to plan for it
already.
While our focus throughout the sesquicentennial will be on
what we can take from our history as guides to the way we will
want to shape our future—the sesquicentennial will not
be a sentimental celebration of our past—nonetheless,
beginning to think about it has raised my curiosity about how
we have and have not actually been shaped by critical values
built into this place at our founding. Understanding our history,
in my view, is essential for transforming the present. In my
experience, knowing the genes of a place—how it is wired,
if you will—is essential to managing change so that it
feels right. All institutions must change with the times … but
institutions that change guided by their most central values
are really simultaneously changing and staying the same. When
even profound change can be seen as continuity with the past,
institutions can make their way to very new places with surprising
ease.
What are these values that can be our road map? For me they
have always been a wonderful blend of North Country , frontier
values with those values we associate with the Universalist
Church , whose theological seminary was a part of St. Lawrence
University until 1965 and whose influence on the University
was powerful throughout its first century. I said it this way
in a St. Lawrence magazine article almost eight years ago and
wouldn’t change it today:
While shaped and nurtured by the North Country, St. Lawrence
is yet a place much in and of the wider world—a place
which gives its students North Country roots, but which also
teaches them about and connects them, via first-hand overseas
experience as well as through books and talk, to the big issues
in the world today, and to the little people as well as the
big people of the world. The North Country side of our character
includes, in my view, a kind of simplicity, directness, lack
of pretension, honesty, fairness, and willingness to forge
ahead and face the unknown squarely. . . . One can feel it
on campus, and in the town, and it feels right.
At the same time, there is here something cosmopolitan, worldly,
progressive, and reformist, committed to equality, equity and
truth-telling—Universalist values joined to the frontier
character just described. What this means is that struggles
like our quest to be more diverse, inclusive and multicultural
are really about continuity with the past—being true
to our nature—rather than about striking off in a new
direction. We pursue these and other changes in the present
and future of St. Lawrence not as a rejection of the past,
but as an attempt to remain true to the values most central
to our character—values brought together in this institution
in the middle of the 19th century.
At the same time, when we see significant connections between
our present and our past, it is easy to romanticize and mythologize
that past. I am as guilty as anyone, and even my early just “scratching
the surface” efforts to look backward in time with a
critical eye will temper my future rhetoric about our history.
Take, for example, the fact that we have been co-educational
from the very beginning, and our theological school ordained
Olympia Brown as “the first woman in our country to achieve
full ministerial standing recognized by a denomination.” The
well-known commitment of Universalists to inclusiveness makes
it easy, without real study, to swell with pride at such a
bold step taken by this university and assume it was but a
natural, wholesome, expression of a welcoming and generous
spirit—the same spirit that, having been built into our
genes by our founders rests comfortably within us today.
So how did it look and feel to Olympia Brown, an indefatigable
reformer and feminist who spent a lifetime fighting for women’s
rights—especially the right to vote—who thankfully
lived to see it happen in 1920 after devoting 60 years of her
life to the cause? Born on a frontier farm in Michigan in 1835
and already a schoolteacher by age 15, Olympia was sent off
in 1854 to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. But, according
to Dana Green in her edition of the speeches and writings of
Olympia Brown: “she disliked the stultifying life there,
the useless rules and especially the prevailing religious belief
in a wrathful and punishing God. . . . . . . . . In 1856, when
she could stand Mount Holyoke no longer, she enrolled in Antioch
College , a co-educational institution under the enlightened
leadership of Horace Mann.”
Having finished her studies at Antioch in 1860, she decided
to enter the ministry. This is how she described that time
in her life in a memoir published in 1911:
The theological schools, for the most part, were purely for
men. Oberlin had received women under protest and with limitations.
The Unitarian Theological School at Meadville , Pennsylvania
, refused to receive a woman, saying their trustees “regarded
it as too great an innovation.” The theological school
connected with St. Lawrence University at Canton, New York,
appeared to be the only place practicable for obtaining an
education for the ministerial profession and even there, in
spite of the democratic principles which are necessarily involved
in the broad humanitarian doctrines of the Universalist Church,
there was much misunderstanding of the motives of the applicant
for admission and much unwarranted prejudice on the subject.
There was also to be met, as in all the efforts for woman’s
advancement, a certain amount of jealousy and considerations
of personal interest, as when a young, would-be theologian
urged that it would never do to allow a woman to pass through
the theological school because there were so many women out
of employment that the ministry would be overrun with them
and this would “lower the price of preaching.”
She went on to say:
Dr. Ebenezer Fisher, the president of the institution, had
said on admitting me that “although he did not think
women were called to the ministry, yet he left it between me
and the great Head of the Church.” This seemed to me
a very appropriate place to leave the question and I did not
think that young and inexperienced students were better suited
to decide it than the Authority referred to by Dr. Fisher.
Describing the issues on campus at the time, for it was during
the Civil War, she said:
The school, as a part of the great Republic, naturally reflected
the popular ideas and consequently was divided on the subject
of politics. One would have expected that the “Liberal” and “Progressive” party
would be most favorable to the advancement of women, but such
was not the case. Young men who could scarcely find words sufficiently
strong to express their feelings on the subject of liberty
for all [referring here, of course, to the issue of slavery]
were the ones who led the way in the effort to drive out the
first woman who had dared to invade the sacred precincts of
the Divinity School . . . Indeed, a lecturer who came to the
school on one occasion was so eloquent and showed so much enthusiasm
for justice for even the meanest and the poorest, and was so
broad in his views of liberty that I was greatly impressed
and addressed a letter to him thanking him for his strong words
in behalf of justice, in some way also revealing the fact that
I supposed women were included in what he had to say. I am
sorry to say that I received in reply a most severe rebuke.
It’s pretty clear that we cannot project back upon
the past at St. Lawrence our sense of what it means to be an
institution committed to equality for women today. Olympia
Brown writes with clarity and passion about what it was really
like from her perspective. And yet, our theological school
did admit her when no other school would. She did graduate,
in 1863, as our first woman graduate, and she was ordained,
even though describing it this way: “Thus I went on trembling,
but undaunted, through the theological school and passed the
ordeal of ordination which was somewhat bitterly contested.” As
grudging and difficult as St. Lawrence was back then for women,
seen through the lens of today, the university was nevertheless
truly radical in its willingness to go where it did.
I’ve come to the point where I think it is OK to be
really proud of St. Lawrence on this issue, despite the obviously
very painful experience early women students like Olympia Brown
clearly had at St. Lawrence. I do believe that a commitment
to inclusiveness is in the genes of this place, but we must
be careful not to project onto the past what we mean by such
a term today.
Why subject you to such a treatise on the history of the
University on this day? Partly, of course, because as those
who know me best will attest, I just can’t stand not
sharing with whomever is around at the time whatever I’m
currently learning about. But also it’s because I am
convinced that our future together—town and gown—will
continue to get better the more we understand our past. That
too will be a part of our sesquicentennial. We at St. Lawrence
feel blessed to be here in this beautiful North Country with
all of you. Together we will build a wonderful future on the
best values of our past.
As we all gather with family and friends this
holiday season, let us not forget those who are unable to do
so—most particularly
the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed overseas
and subject daily to the ultimate risk. Thank you for being
with us today, and very best holiday wishes to you all!
Dana Green, Suffrage
and Religious Principle: Speeches and Writings of Olympia Brown (Metuchen,
New Jersey, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983), 2.
Olympia Brown, Acquaintances,
Old and New, Among Reformers (Milwaukee, S.E. Tate, 1911), 27.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid., 29-30.
Ibid., 30.
