Feature Article

Many of us at St. Lawrence love the fact that on the same campus we have sports, environmental clubs, community service groups, ethnic dancers, a black student union, religious organizations, arts ensembles, peer educators on issues of sexual violence, foreign language and culture clubs, and many more extra-curricular activities.

What is good for Canton is good for St. Lawrence. That’s what Peter Van De Water believes based on his decades of experience in dealing with the university and the town.

Van De Water, a former St. Lawrence University vice-president of student affairs, said it’s an approach that he hopes incoming president Bill Fox will build upon.

At a recent talk with students in a class, President Dan Sullivan told a story about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s early experience as the president of Columbia University.  Apparently at his first faculty meeting, Eisenhower began by saying, “Fellow employees of Columbia University…”
Suddenly, I.I. Rabi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist leapt to his feet and said, “Mr. President, we are not employees of the university, we ARE the university!” 

Before President Dan Sullivan’s arrival in 1996, no new buildings had been constructed on campus since 1972.

“I was thoroughly shitfaced last night,” a St. Lawrence junior, who asked to remain anonymous, recently recalled with a guilty smile. “We pre-gamed over at Whitman, played card games and ripped about five shots of Barton’s (vodka), ‘cause it’s cheap and gets the job done. Then we walked to a (SLU) party off campus. I played like five or six games of Beirut and had a couple of beers in between. Headed to the Tick Tock around midnight. This is where things get patchy. I danced a bunch and think I made out with a rando’ in the back bar!

St. Lawrence athletes are experiencing a new kind of achievement that stretches well beyond the win or loss column. By the time they graduate, their academic performance is equal to their non-athlete counterparts, university figures show.
Comprised of 32 teams, athletics encompasses about a third of the student body at St. Lawrence and the university says they are completely representative, participating in a wide range of student activities and choosing majors in every field.

St. Lawrence University regularly provides approximately 80 percent of its students with financial aid, which is often a decisive factor in choosing a school. 
Mary, for instance, a sophomore from New Hampshire, said she had applied to more than a dozen schools. Although St. Lawrence was on her list, she worried about its remoteness and relatively small size, and there was no way she could afford its tuition, room and board, and fees, which now runs about $50,000 a year.  

Binders packed with graphs and statistics about St. Lawrence’s finances fill the bookcases in Kathryn Mullaney’s office. One graph that jumps out illustrates a success story. It shows a steep upward curve for the growth in the university endowment’s market value, which rose from $50 million in 1984-85 to a $269 million peak in 2006-07, and then a small drop to $245 million last year.