Lawrence Today, Volume 79, Number 2, Winter 1998 Lawrence University

Lawrence University Lux Alumni Magazines Communications Winter 1998 Lawrence Today, Volume 79, Number 2, Winter 1998 Lawrence University Follow this and additional works at: http://lux.lawrence.edu/alumni_magazines Part of the Liberal Studies Commons © Copyright is owned by the author of this document. Recommended Citation Lawrence University, "Lawrence Today, Volume 79, Number 2, Winter 1998" (1998). Alumni Magazines. Book 22. http://lux.lawrence.edu/alumni_magazines/22 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Communications at Lux. It has been accepted for inclusion in Alumni Magazines by an authorized administrator of Lux. For more information, please contact [email protected]. T D A y WINTER 1998 The Magazine of Lawrence University VOL. 79, NO. 2 President's Report 1997-98 Lawrence T 0 D A Y Editor Gordon E. Brown 920-832-6593 [email protected] Art director Marsha Tuchscherer Contributors Steven Blodgett Rick Peterson Special thanks to Image Studios for providing photography for this issue and to Fox River Paper Company for contributing the stock on which it is printed. Address Correspondence to: Lawrence Today Lawrence University P.O. Box 599 Appleton, WI 54912-0599 920-832-6586 Fax: 920-832-6783 Lawrence Today (USPS 012-683) is pub lished quarterly m March, June, September, and December by the Office of Public Affairs, Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin 54911. Periodical postage paid at Appleton, Wisconsin 54911. Postmaster: Send address changes to Lawrence Today, Lawrence University, ll5 South Drew Street, Appleton, WI 549ll-5798. Articles are expressly the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent official university policy. We reserve the right to edit correspondence for length and accuracy. Lawrence University promotes equal opportunity for all. Contents President's Message 3 Dogfish and Sonnets: Some Thoughts on U nmediated Learning Richard Warch, President Financial Report 11 William Hodgkiss, Vice-President for Business Mfairs and Administration Fund-Raising Report 15 Gregory A. Volk, Vice-President for Development and External Mfairs Faculty Creative and 19 Scholarly Achievements Highlights of the Year 31 This is Richard Warch's 20th year as president of as associate dean of Yale College, director of summer Lawrence University, a year that will conclude with the plans, and director of Yale's visiting faculty program. 20th anniversaries of the beginning of his presidency on Named one of the top 100 college presidents in the September 1, 1979, and his inauguration on November nation in an Exxon Education Foundation study of effec 29, 1979. Each of the past 20 years he has delivered a tive presidents, he has served as a consultant in American major address at the Matriculation Convocation in Sep studies, history, and the humanities for colleges and uni tember; the first, "Unamuno Begs to Differ," was pub versities, public schools, and the National Endowment lished in the Autumn 1979 issue of Lawrence Today. That for the Humanities and has written and spoken widely on tradition of publication continues with this issue. topics in American religious history, liberal education, Educated at Williams, Edinburgh, and Yale, Richard and history. He is a director of the Associated Colleges of Warch joined the Lawrence faculty and administration in the Midwest, Competitive Wisconsin, Inc., and the 1977 as vice-president for academic affairs and professor Appleton Development Council and chaired a Wisconsin of history. Before corning to Lawrence he was associate Governor's Task Force on Student Debt. professor of history and American studies at Yale, as well 2 Winter 1998 President's Message and onne Some thoughts on unmediated learning I am pleased to share this president's report for the 1997-98 academic year with the readers of Lawrence Today. As has been the case in prior years, this report is a rendition of my matriculation address to the college community, and while the audience in the first instance consisted of students and faculty, I hope that the message will also prove to be of interest to Lawrence's alumni and friends, the former presumably being in the best position to validate the claims I forward for the consequences of liberal learning. he beginning of a new colleges, long-distance learning, and degrees academic year seems offered through the Internet. Still others lament inevitably to bring with it the deplorable preparation of students for renewed and refreshed college work, complaining that remediation scrutiny and criticism of rather than higher learning has become the higher education. One dominant mode at most institutions. familiar refrain focuses on When Andy Katzenmoyer, the famed Ohio the notion that faculty don't teach, students State linebacker, takes summer courses in golf don't learn, and the whole enterprise is ineffi and AIDS Awareness for credit in order to raise cient and too costly. Another variation suggests his grade-point average to the level of eligibility, that colleges and universities are anachronistic critics find ample grounds for their negative entities, soon to be replaced by "virtual" assessments. And when 59 percent of college Lawrence Today 3 graduates fail a state-administered test for teach ers in Massachusetts, the prophets of doom and gloom have a field day, with former Boston Uni versity President John Silber calling the level of academic work at schools of education "risible." On a rather more somber note, another recent - though hardly novel - trend has been for higher education to be lambasted for not paying sufficient attention to the need to "max imize profitability." As one author put it, "the groves of academe have become a battleground between the forces of liberal education and the regiments of capitalism." Thorstein Veblen had a similar view in 1916, when he excoriated those "captains of erudition" who ran our colleges and universities and for whom "learning and university instruc confidence in the long-term wortl1 of the educa tion are a species of skilled labor, to be hir.ed at tion students seek and secure here. We derive competitive wages and to turn out the largest that confidence from our convictions about the merchantable output." In any case, one conclu intrinsic and instrumental values and conse sion about higher education today is that "the quences of liberal learning, which we find bol regiments of capitalism are winning, and the stered by the track record of our alumni and champions of the life of the mind are in retreat." affirmed by the assessments of business and civic leaders who support our purposes. And so, while The student as consumer we do not cater to consumerism, we are not at Of all of these assaults - and there are all abashed about asserting that Lawrence grad many others I've not cited - perhaps the most uates have acquired and honed the intellectual damning is the one that sees the student as con skills, work ethic, and habits of mind that serve sumer and the institution as provider, offering them admirably for a lifetime, however they what the consumer demands and thus privileg choose to translate their education to tl1eir voca ing the very notion that colleges ought to be tion. My purpose here is not to reexamine, but driven by customer needs and satisfaction. There simply for now to reassert, these abiding claims. is something simplistically seductive about this notion that the student is the customer who Dangers of a consumption mentality demands goods and services from the institu Sometimes we get so battered and befud tion. In many instances, this attitude takes the dled by these withering assaults tl1at we fail to form of the proposition that a college education examine afresh what it is we do here and what is nothing more than the means to some eco aims we have for the educational mission of the nomic end. A great deal of evidence points to college, for each individual student, and hence the fact that students - and their parents - see for each alumnus and alumna. So, in this essay, I higher education as an investment that ought to tl1ink it worth affirming elements of liberal pay dividends. learning that are often subsumed by or It certainly should not alarm college admin neglected in the daily round of teaching and > -C CL ~ istrators or faculty members that students and learning, studying and working, practicing and 0'1 B 0 parents think this way, and obviously, those of us -C performing, as we go about our business here. a.. Ci who believe in Lawrence and its mission have To begin, I would remind all of us that a "'CL <( 4 Winter 1998 defining characteristic of the aims of liberal edu can writer - his novel The Moviegoer won the cation at Lawrence, in both college and conser National Book Award in 1962 - but he also vatory, is to place the individual student at the wrote essays about language, meaning, and exis center of the enterprise. Indeed, our purpose, in tence for relatively little-known magazines and the end, is to provide opportunities for each journals. individual student to come to understand and In the introductory essay to his book The value his or her standing as an individual. Message in the Bottle, a collection of these arti But in seeking to achieve that goal, we must des, Percy asks a series of questions, which also appreciate the structural and even inten stretch over several pages. Three of them relate tional difficulties we face and create, as teachers to what I'd like to consider here: and learners, in doing so. A great danger faced by students in pursuing an education is that they 1. "Why is it harder to study a dogfish on a dis can become captivated, even mesmerized, by the secting board in a zoological laboratory in col construct, the routine, and the rhythm of lege where one has proper instruments and a courses, and laboratories, and rehearsals, and proper light than it would be if one were assignments, and papers, and recitals, and exam marooned on an island and, having come upon inations.

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