Remarks of Welcome
First Faculty/Staff Meeting— Monday, August 25, 2003
Daniel F. Sullivan

Welcome back to continuing faculty and staff, and welcome again to our new faculty and staff. The excitement in the room on this opening day each year is palpable. We are about to have a fresh new beginning to the best work in the world. It’s great to be here with you to undertake it.

This is the beginning of our eighth year together—you and I. While I continue to be cautious about some of the challenges ahead, I very much like what we have accomplished together in the last several years. St. Lawrence is in the process of repositioning itself among the nation’s liberal arts colleges. As we have become more academically demanding while remaining a university that is highly focused on the whole student, we are recruiting more and more students who bring real seriousness of purpose to their academic work who also intend at the same time to take part in the full range of co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities St. Lawrence makes available. While other selective liberal arts colleges talk about a well-rounded class made up of a diversity of highly specialized superstars, we seek a well-rounded class made up of well-rounded students who are serious of purpose academically.

A number of years ago, but not recently, St. Lawrence was on The Princeton Review’s list of best party schools. This year we are listed tenth among the Review’s list of 20 in their “academics” category called "Their Students Never Stop Studying.” One takes The Princeton Review with a grain of salt, but this change symbolizes a real shift in our reputation that is a significant part of our increasing success in admissions. Such repositioning is not an easy thing to do—we’re talking about changing the campus culture and the outside perception of it—but we’re doing it. For those of you who have already been a part of it, a warm and heartfelt thanks! For those who are just signing on, get ready for tough work and a good ride.

Before I share with you some of the news from over the summer, I can’t resist the impulse to tell you the very best Ole and Lena story I heard this summer. Minnesotans in the audience will especially appreciate it!

Ole died, and Lena went down to the newspaper to arrange for his obituary. The editor asked her what she wanted the obituary to say, and she replied: “Ole died.”

 

He said, “ Lena, you and Ole were married over 40 years, don’t you want to say something more than that? And besides, you get the first five words free.”

 

Lena thought for a moment, and than said: “OK, say this: Ole died. Boat for sale!”

 

Now let’s turn to the news.

 

• The admissions numbers continue to be very strong and on target. As of this moment, we have 568 deposits active for the Class of 2007. Of this number, 21 were from our waitlist. Diversity numbers continue strong also, with 11.3% (64) of the deposited students being U. S. students of color—nearly double last year’s percentage. While we are again providing need-based St. Lawrence grant aid to over 75% of these new students, ensuring a very diverse class from a family income point of view, we have been again this year more attractive to those students who can afford full tuition. The percentage of the deposited group from the top 10% of their high school classes is 36% (up from 31% last year), while 69% were in the top quarter of their classes (up from 62% last year). Transfer deposits are at 22, about the same as last year. In her annual tour de force, Terry Cowdrey will tell you more about the class in her remarks at Matriculation later today.

Last Friday, 94 families (up from 73 last year) were on campus for our late summer admissions open house, in which I know a number of you participated. No rest for the weary!

• We won’t know final retention numbers for a couple of weeks yet, but so far they look strong also. Fewer students, on a percentage basis, are leaving St. Lawrence before they finish their degrees. The graduation rate, in other words, is going up.
• A great deal of action and planning has been happening in the academic area under Grant’s leadership. He has prepared his annual “Dean’s Report to the Faculty” that he has shared with his staff and will be sharing with the faculty as a whole shortly as well as the Board of Trustees for its October meeting. It lays out a powerful agenda and a great deal of progress. I’ll steal just a little of his thunder and mention a few items and issues here:
• Several new categories of faculty appointments have been established, and some actual such appointments approved, as part of our effort to introduce more flexibility into faculty positions in response to concerns of women faculty and faculty spouses and partners.
• A much more structured process for handling faculty and academic staff position requests for the 2004-05 year was implemented early in the summer so that searches could begin earlier, with greater prospect of attracting candidates bringing diversity. As you may not know, we have committed to allocating roughly half of the savings from future faculty retirements (and 100% of the savings from currently scheduled retirements of arts faculty) to strategic faculty and academic staff additions, with the remaining 1/2 dropping to the bottom line. This has made it possible to commit to 7 new or enhanced positions for 2004-05, including:
• A new tenure-track faculty position in biochemistry
• A new 2/3rds tenure-track faculty position in English
• A new senior lecturer position in Canadian Studies
• A new lecturer position in the First-Year Program
• A full-time lab coordinator in chemistry, where there was a part-time position
• A full-time chemical stockroom and hygiene coordinator, where there was a part-time position
• A full-time technician in science support, where there was a part-time position

The lecturer and part-time positions are examples of the new appointment categories mentioned above.

• In the area of diversity, we have received a very competitive grant from the NCAA to hire a staff person to work with coaches on diversity issues on their teams, work with individual student athletes to promote academic achievement, and work to recruit diverse student athletes. In addition, we have learned that we are the recipients of a highly competitive McNair grant from the federal government of $220,000/year for up to five years to support academic achievement of students from groups underrepresented in the academy. Students selected as McNair Scholars will work with faculty mentors on research projects and other activities designed to prepare them for graduate school, specifically to pursue the Ph.D. To be selected for this grant at this time is very significant testimony to our readiness, resolve, and seriousness of purpose around issues of diversity.
• Summer in the student life division is about planning, planning, and more planning for when students arrive back on campus, and about ensuring that our residential and other student life facilities upgrades happen as designed and budgeted. Every year there is major residential facility renovation scheduled. Just as that makes life frantic for our facilities operations folks, it makes life frantic for Cissy and her staff. But we’re ready, thanks to all involved.

As you may remember from the spring, the student life staff had 4 mid-level and 5 entry-level positions open. I’m pleased to report that all 9 are filled, and represent both diversity and talented backgrounds in student development. The student life team has been utilizing that diversity and background in planning intentional co-curricular programming around diversity for the upcoming year, and last week while preparing for the arrival of our first-year class held a daylong workshop for 100 student leaders.

As spring semester ended, some of you will recall that the Phi Sigma Kappa national fraternigy was about to consider the possibility of closing our chapter, the possibly final straw being the mistreatment of the house by departing seniors and some underclass members. In the end the chapter was not closed, though is on the stiffest probationary status any of us has ever seen. I have informed Phi Sig national that I will close the chapter if there are any violations of the terms of the probation.

And on a very sad note, I want to acknowledge here what many of you already know, and that is that Will O’Brien of the Class of 2006 was killed in an accident at home shortly after the end of the semester. A memorial service is being planned. As we know details we will inform the community.

• Final fund raising numbers were also very strong. Total fiscal 2003 gift income from private sources was a second-best ever $18 million, down slightly from the $18.8 million we raised last year. We're quite certain this will place us above the mean for total giving within the New Comparison Group (NCG), continuing our positive trajectory in our benchmarking with that group. It’s an amazing result, really, given the state of the economy and the uncertainty of the world situation. Concerns persist with the St. Lawrence Fund—which includes gifts people make to support our current operating budget. It declined 5% and experienced an erosion of the alumni donor base of nearly 500 graduates. Some of this can be explained by continued donor financial uncertainty, but it’s obvious that we’re going to have to work harder and smarter on this problem.

Planning for the Campaign Celebration October 4-5 continues and to date we have over 150 registrants returning for the weekend. There is no better way to cultivate future gifts from donors to Campaign St. Lawrence than to thank them properly, and to show them the impact their gifts have had on the university. Many of you will be helping us in that effort. To you, a warm and heartfelt thanks in advance!

• The campus has once again been alive with construction, renovation, and refurbishment this summer.

 

• The new student center continues to be on time and on budget. We continue to plan for opening at the beginning of next semester.
• The senior townhouses are complete and ready for occupancy. Indeed, some students (e.g. athletes) have already moved in and we have heard that their reactions are very positive. I am delighted with how they look and relieved that the project made it on time.
• This summer’s residential refurbishment project involved a number of off-campus houses near campus. They received significant upgrading work inside, and all (and some others) were painted in a variety of Victorian-style colors to add to the attractiveness of the immediate campus neighborhood.
• Our science project design work continues. Some hard choices are coming up to keep the project’s cost-estimate under the $60 million budget, but the word I’m getting is that this will be accomplished.
• We have signed a construction contract to begin the Wachtmeister Field Laboratory. Due to permitting complexities, it has taken us a long time to get this one going, but it’s now happening.
• In addition to all of this, the facilities staff is managing 118 separate other capital projects budgeted at $2.2 million emanating from the annual capital plan! As always, our facilities operations group does an amazing job over the summer.
• The IT folks have also had a very busy summer:
• IT has swapped out nearly 1400 computers, printers, and other peripherals over the summer, working with all faculty and staff to ensure that the process went smoothly. The old machines left campus last week, having been sold to a firm that will rebuild and/or salvage them.
• Campus cable TV services have been renegotiated, renewing the contract with Time Warner for an additional three years. Student residences, classrooms, and faculty and staff offices will be receiving additional programming material (primarily, additional foreign language channels) once Time Warner completes the acquisition and installation of some new equipment. Changeover is scheduled during late September or early October.
• The SCT Banner Business Process Analysis has remained on schedule since the hiccup in April. It now seems likely to be completed in mid-September, so the final report should be available to us in October. We also have completed price negotiations with SCT, so we shall be ready to discuss with relevant on-campus governance groups and the trustees in October to what extent we will proceed with our administrative system conversion taking into account the prioritization of all of our future capital needs we will be undertaking shortly in a joint meeting of Priorities and Planning and Buildings and Grounds. In the meantime, our own software development group has been participating in this process analysis and learning from it. As a consequence they have been revising many of the applications that drive our existing administrative system, incorporating more modern and more efficient techniques.
• Finally, several of the older electronic classrooms were rebuilt over the summer to a current, state of the art level.
• On the financial front, we finished last year as we had planned to: with a positive “cash budget” but an approximately $3 million operating deficit when depreciation, a non-cash expense, is taken into account. We have really pushed the financial envelope to make the investments in people, programs, and facilities necessary for the repositioning of the university on which we’ve embarked. The positive impacts on revenue are showing up, as we have anticipated, but we have 3-5 years of hard work to pull it all together into a sustainable financial picture at a new, higher level, necessary to keep up the momentum.

That’s more summer news than I usually provide at this meeting, but so much has happened that I thought I should take the time to share it.

My personal priorities for the year are all about sustaining the remarkable momentum we have achieved. We have enormous, transformative agendas under way all throughout the University—from the academic program to student life to diversity to IT and facilities to admissions and fund raising—and they are related to each other systemically. We are a high-energy, ambitious university with our focus, thanks to all of you, on the right issues in the liberal arts education of young people.

With so much at stake in the world we face today, nothing less than our highest effort to prepare our graduates to play a constructive role is acceptable. You’ve created a culture here that sustains such justifiable ambition. Just remember that you may wake up one day and learn that one of your former students is the President of the United States . Let’s make sure that we will be proud of her!

I am absolutely delighted that you let me tag along in all of this. Thank you.