State of the College Address, October 18, 2006
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Good afternoon, and welcome. Let me first of all thank each of you for being here—and by “here” I mean first of all being here in Agnes Flanagan Chapel at this time. I know that for some of you, your attendance this afternoon has required some sacrifices and some shifting of your schedules, and I am grateful. But by “here” I also mean being here as part of the larger Lewis & Clark community—the community that is neither confined to a particular place, nor constrained by a period of time, but is bound by our common affection for the College and an abiding commitment to our mission and values.
This State of the College Address is a new phenomenon for all of us. I decided to call this gathering in part prompted by our Planning Task Force from last year, which recommended that we find more opportunities to gather as a community, and that we create more venues for enhancing transparent communication across the institution and person-to-person. But I was also moved by a desire to take advantage of the very real and palpable momentum being generated by each of our schools and on our campus as a whole. Wonderful things take place here every day, and it is appropriate that we celebrate our work. My remarks this afternoon will touch on some of those celebratory things. But any discussion of where we are and where we are going as an institution must also include a financial report, and much of what I will say today is simply information and context about the financial state of the College. In the process of so doing, I will also look at the state of our endowment and at our recent history and new strategies for fund raising and development. I hope in the course of the next hour that you will come to share with me a sense of the tremendous potential that we as an institution possess in this, our 140th year of operation.
In preparing these remarks, I have certainly been aware that they will be available to a wider audience than those of us gathered in the chapel now. But I have prepared them specifically to address most of all you, our faculty and staff. If space had permitted, I would also have invited our entire student body, since our students have a stake in the future of Lewis & Clark every bit as deep as do we who are employed by the College. Regrettably, we do not have a venue large enough to convene the entire College community, so in lieu of inviting all students, I have asked the leadership of the three student governments to attend today’s session. The Pio Log is also represented. Let me add that if any students might wander in, or any alum or anyone from the community at large for that matter, they are most certainly welcome.
To begin, please let me call to mind for a moment a piece of our past. Last spring, on April 11, the College recommissioned three classrooms in Howard Hall honoring the legacies of three distinguished professors: Benjamin Thaxter, T. J. Edmonds, and Arthur Throckmorton. We also dedicated a classroom to honor another distinguished professor, mentor, and friend, one whose legacy is still growing: U. G. Dubach Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Don Balmer. In his reminiscences and reflections that April afternoon, Don shared stories of teaching on Palatine Hill in the early 1950s, when war surplus buildings served as classroom facilities. He mentioned that he always made sure to carry with him to class a particularly thick book, and some of you here may remember those days. He hefted it about not for reference nor to impress his students, but because it was exactly the right size for propping open a Quonset hut window when the heat from radiators was too unremitting in the winter, and when a cooling breeze was needed in spring or summer. At Lewis & Clark, we have always been innovative and industrious in using the resources at hand to do the work that needs to be done.
The challenges of classroom ventilation notwithstanding, Don calls this post-War period a heady time in the history of the College. After a tenuous start on Palatine Hill in the 1940’s, the College was beginning to regain its academic legs. For professors who had known first hand the hunger and want of the Great Depression, and for students who were part of the G. I. Generation, the opportunity to gather and collectively pursue knowledge for its own sake was both precious and inspiring. Those of us who came after learned from family stories and from our own experience that an emerging middle class saw this time as a rebirth of the American spirit and of American higher education. We also know that vast segments of American society were neither invited to nor allowed to be full participants in this process or its benefits.
I make reference to Don Balmer’s comments last April as a way to set a context and to illustrate a point. The context is to remind each of us that where we are today—as a College and as a community—derives from the hard and dedicated work of many gifted people from our past. The utilitarian huts that marked these grounds not so long ago could not stifle the wellspring of mental and physical energy that surged through faculty and staff then and continues to inform our work today. And so the illustrative point is this: Where we gather matters only a little. Whom we gather with, what we say to each other, the spirit of openness in our exchanges, the stories we share, and the actions we take together: those are the things that truly matter. They are the true stuff of community.
I want to stop at this point to make a few introductions. Some of those whom I want to introduce are probably well known to most of you here, but we should be mindful that there are those among us who are relatively new to Lewis & Clark and who do not necessarily know the individuals whom I am about to name. So please humor me as I introduce the senior leadership of the College:
- Vice President and Provost, Jane Monnig Atkinson;
- Vice President for Institutional Advancement, Philip J. Akers;
- Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Julio de Paula;
- Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Counseling,
- Peter W. Cookson, Jr.; and
- Interim Dean of the Northwestern School of Law, Lydia Loren.
Two others who are not here today are:
I also want to acknowledge and thank a special member of our community, one who has provided us the venue for today’s program, Dean of the Chapel the Reverend Mark Duntley.
In recent months we have also filled several key positions in the central administration of the College. No doubt many of you have either already met or heard of these new members of our community:
Let me take this opportunity to welcome each of you newcomers, and any other recently arrived members of our community as well. In naming these particular individuals, I by no stretch of the imagination mean to understate the importance of other employees, new and not so new. Far from it, each of us at Lewis & Clark has specific responsibilities unique to the position we hold. And each of us fulfills a set of tasks without which the College would be much diminished. And each of us also—no matter whether our responsibilities are broadly institutional or centered in one of our three schools—each of us has a responsibility to advance the mission of teaching, research, and service that binds us together as one institution.
To return to the work of the Planning Task Force, I am reminded that I convened the task force just about this same time last year, so that referencing some of its findings today provides a certain symmetry. In its composition, its processes, and its conclusions, the task force represents the closest thing to consensus that we have experienced in recent years at Lewis & Clark, and as such, it remains for us a model for useful collaboration at the institutional level. It also pointed the way to our shared future by identifying the key issues that currently confront our community, as articulated in its six strategic goals:
1. Grow and wisely use our financial resources.
2. Enhance the Lewis & Clark College community.
3. Strengthen our academic programs.
4. Attract and retain a well-qualified student body.
5. Promote organizational effectiveness.
6. Improve the campus infrastructure.
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In my time remaining, I will touch on each of these goals—not necessarily in order—and comment on ways in which we are addressing them. The first goal, “grow and wisely use our financial resources,” prompts me to begin by discussing some rather dry information that nevertheless testifies to the robust financial well-being of the College. I am pleased to report that fiscal year 2005-2006 was a good year for Lewis & Clark. This slide shows the last two years of operating results for the College. I want to spend just a few moments walking through these numbers, because I think they are illustrative of several broader points that I would like to convey to you all today. Please note that the numbers shown here are in thousands of dollars. Thus, the net operating revenues shown in the middle of the page for the last two years are, respectively, $81,980,000 for 2004-05, and $88,110,000 for fiscal year 2005-06. The operating margins for these two years were respectively $2,060,000 and $300,000, both positive, a significant fact. Lewis & Clark has operated in the black for many, many years. Fiscal years at Lewis & Clark, I should note, end on May 31.
So my first point today is that we are a very substantial operation, with total operating revenues in the last several years well in excess of $100 million. For the fiscal year we are now in, fiscal 2006-2007, the total operating revenues are forecast to be nearly $117 million. You can see from the chart that the largest element in our revenue stream is tuition, accounting last year for more than $84 million. Undergraduate room and board brought in $8,790,000, while the endowment yielded $8,850,000. Gifts and contracts brought in $4,060,000, and all other revenue sources yielded $4,490,000. It is normal for colleges such as Lewis & Clark to show operating revenues net of any institutional financial aid, which in 2005-06 was $22,490,000. Thus net operating revenue was $88,110,000 for the year.
On the expense side, by far the largest item is the support of the academic program, including faculty salaries and benefits, followed by departmental operating budgets, and related expenses such as academic advising, library services, and institutional support for instruction and research. Residential services are the expenses incurred for housing and feeding undergraduates. Common services are those centralized activities that benefit all three of our schools and that are for the most part charged back to the schools as part of their operating budgets. Next comes debt service, which is a sizeable and growing chunk of our expenditure budget, a point to which I will return in a moment. Finally, we at Lewis & Clark fund our depreciation, that is, we recognize the aging of our capital plant and capital equipment as an expense in our operating budget and actually set money aside to ensure that the campus is well maintained and that renovations can proceed in an orderly, predictable fashion. That practice is a wise one that our Board insists upon, and our ability to keep this campus looking beautiful is in large measure due to this line item in our operating budget.
I want to make two particular points at this juncture in relation to our operating results over the last two years. The first is to reinforce the fact not only that academics are the single largest item in our budget but also that support for academics is growing at a faster rate than any other purely operational part of the budget. Last year, outlays for the academic program grew by 12% relative to the previous year. In contrast, common services, which might loosely be termed administrative overhead for the institution, rose by only 3%, from $16,590,000 to $17,110,000. This relationship is as it should be in an institution dedicated as we are to an educational mission. It is also responsive to the third of the Planning Task Force’s six strategic goals for Lewis & Clark, namely, to strengthen the academic programs of the College. I would nevertheless never want to suggest that the non-academic support services of the institution—including, basically, facilities, information technology, institutional advancement, the president’s office, among others—are any less important to the good functioning of our College than the work carried out on the academic side of the house. I would, however, emphasize that good stewardship of the resources entrusted to us for educating students and expanding knowledge requires of us that we be efficient in how we go about our business, and to that extent we must strive diligently on an ongoing basis to limit the growth of administrative overhead to those items that can most effectively promote the broader mission of the institution as a whole.
The second point is that our operating margins are very, very small for an institution of our size and complexity. The operating margin in any given year is simply what’s left over after you pay all the bills. Last year, on a budget of over $110 million in gross revenue, our margin was barely $300,000, a sizeable amount to be sure, but a sum representing less than 0.3% of our total revenue. We sail very close to the wind. Some might say that we are just plain lucky. I prefer to think of ourselves as extremely well managed. You will note that in the preceding year, we had a margin slightly in excess of $2 million, due in large measure to the timing of some unexpected windfalls. That year, fiscal 2004-05, was an anomaly for Lewis & Clark. For the current year, we have forecast an operating margin of less than $600,000, or 0.5% of our forecast revenue of $117 million. As president, I must confess to having had a few sleepless nights when I first arrived at Lewis & Clark, as I contemplated the very narrow financial margins on which we operate. On the other hand, I soon learned that we are an institution blessed with excellent managers and attentive administrators, every one of whom understands the imperative of living within a budget. It is a comfort in the wee hours to know that the College is in good hands.
Speaking of good management, I should note that Goal 5 of the Planning Task Force’s recommendations admonished the administration to “promote institutional effectiveness,” and one development in this regard during recent months deserves mention at this time, namely, the creation of an Operations Council for the College. Operations Council had its first monthly meeting last week. It is chaired by the Provost Jane Atkinson and is comprised of managers and directors from the common services area (information technology, institutional advancement, facilities, finance, and so on) as well as from each of the three schools and from student services. The charge of this new group, which is advisory to the Executive Council, is to serve as a point of communication, policy development, and ultimately action on matters that impact the well-being of the entire institution. To that end, the Operations Council will even be involved in the review of budgets for administrative services, so that the group will have real clout in the effort to improve our administrative practices and efficiency. I am grateful to Jane and to those officers of the College who sit on the Operations Council for shouldering this additional but, to my way of thinking, vital responsibility on behalf of all of us.
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To return to the matter of College finance, at the end of the last fiscal year, which ended on May 31, 2006, the total net assets of Lewis & Clark (that is, total assets minus our total liabilities) stood at an impressive $275 million, and the largest single chunk of that number is our endowment. Looking back to the four years from May 31, 2002 to May 31, 2006, the endowment grew from about $137 million to over $197 million, a net increase of about $60 million, as shown on this chart. Some $25 million of this increase came from gifts in the form of matured trusts, that is, we were the beneficiaries of several large estates in each of those three years. The remainder of the growth in the endowment, however, can be attributed to the excellent performance of the College’s invested funds, which, following a downturn between 2002 and 2003, increased the net worth of the College by some $52 million between 2003 and 2006. Of that amount, some $25.3 million occurred in the last fiscal year alone. I might note that as of September 30, 2006, the endowment stood at $201 million and that the market has performed very well in the last several weeks besides.
Let me pause here acknowledge the deep debt of gratitude that we all owe for the hard and sustained work of the Investment Committee of the Board, chaired during this period by Trustee Christopher Jay of Anchorage, Alaska. In concert with the financial officers of the College, the Committee has demonstrated superb stewardship of these resources, generating an enviable record of performance for the College’s investments.
The endowment is an important measure of institutional strength at any private institution of higher learning, and especially at Lewis & Clark College. It is worth noting that private colleges and universities, unlike public institutions, do not rely on substantial government funding or public support. Our Board has established a spending policy for the College whereby under normal circumstances, we are permitted to spend no more than 4.5% of the average value of the endowment over the course of the preceding four years. Assuming an average value of the endowment of about $150 million over the last four years, we would normally have spent about $6.75 million during the fiscal year that ended on May 31, 2006. In point of fact, however, our actual spending from the endowment was considerably more than the normal 4.5% last year, due to a temporary exception allowed by the Board to permit the College to pay the service on some of our debt. Thus, we expended an additional $2 million for paying the scheduled interest and principal on our borrowings.
In future, however, prudence and fiduciary diligence suggest that we reduce the extra spending from the endowment for servicing the debt and rely increasingly on other sources of operating revenue—mainly tuition and gifts—for that purpose. The administration and the Board are agreed that the College must move slowly in that direction, a policy shift that naturally has implications for other parts of the budget in the years to come. Thus, while our investment performance is generally robust and our overall financial profile is strong, we still face significant budgetary challenges as we focus on strengthening and growing our educational programs, enhancing our facilities, and, as I have committed in other venues and at other times, increasing compensation for our faculty and staff. The task of weaning ourselves from the practice of using endowment income to pay off debt is complicated by the fact that our debt service will be increasing over the next several years. Simply stated, we have borrowed to do good things here on campus over the last fifteen years, and now we are obligated to pay it back.
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This chart shows the debt service that the College is required to pay to our bond holders, both interest and principle, from fiscal years 2004 through 2020. Needless to say, our very creditworthiness depends upon our diligence in providing for the retirement of our debt based on the scheduled payments reflected in this chart. I should note that our current scheduled debt payments go far beyond the year 2020, and our total borrowings as of today are scheduled to be fully paid off more than a quarter century into the future, in the year 2032. Shown here in the vertical bars is the nominal debt service, that is, the amount that we need to write out checks in every year going forward to the year 2020. Also shown, however, are what I would call “real dollars,” that is the value of those payments in current-year dollars, assuming a 3% inflation rate in each year between now and 2020. That amount is shown in the line on the chart.
Looking at the yellow bars, one can not help but be somewhat daunted by the magnitude of the task ahead that we face in retiring this debt. In fact, our current indebtedness as an institution stands at approximately $108 million. I would note parenthetically, however, that the structure of our debt is very favorable indeed to the College, with interest rates at or less than 4%. We are currently in the process of developing strategies that will lock in those low rates for all of our debt so that we can plan and budget with certainty in the years ahead.
Every cent of those borrowings, I would insist, has been incurred for the very best of reasons, namely to enhance the physical plant and infrastructure of Lewis & Clark College, reaching back all the way to 1990. Every one of us is the beneficiary of the great things that have been accomplished with these funds. Our enhanced competitiveness for good students and great faculty rests in large measure on the facilities that grace our campus and on the foresight of those who have provided the classrooms, offices, and laboratories where we spend our lives. Our current debt service arises primarily from bonds issued to support the completion of the Signature Project and the Seven-Year Plan. The project and the plan together allowed Lewis & Clark to construct, expand, and renovate critically needed buildings and facilities for each of our schools. These capital projects have stimulated intellectual life on Palatine Hill while reinvigorating our sense of community. The results of these projects, I might add, also make it possible for faculty and students to turn to their books as learning resources rather than window props.
Please let me say a word about the real debt service line on the chart. In a sense, that line, because it is relatively flat for the period going forward to about 2014, demonstrates that debt service has reached a plateau as a percentage of our overall budget. That is one way to interpret this graph, and that fact, that debt service will not grow in real terms in the next few years and then will decline as a percentage of our total operating budget, is a tribute to the wisdom of those who have worked over the last few years to structure the debt. Unless we choose to increase our borrowings, debt service for the foreseeable future will for all intents and purposes never represent a higher percentage of our operating budget than it does at present. And that is very good news indeed.
Having said that, however, I need to remind you that the subsidy that we have allowed ourselves in recent years by raising the percentage that we were drawing down from the endowment is going away. The reason for limiting our rate of spending from the endowment is that of preserving what we call “generational equity.” Those who have generously contributed to the College’s endowed funds in the past and those who will continue to do so into the future expect of us that we will protect those funds so that they will appreciate in value and continue to generate income for the College. The College is bound as a fiduciary of those funds to ensure that this expectation is met. In any given year, therefore, we may raise or lower our spending formula in response to market conditions, but over time, we must discipline ourselves in the use of the endowment so as to preserve the value of those gifts in perpetuity.
Before leaving the matter of institutional debt altogether, I might note that in the future, it may be possible, if interest rates were to fall, to refinance our debt out beyond the year 2032 so as to relieve the operating budget further. But we do have some hard choices to make, since any new capital projects that we may want to undertake will require us to examine our debt situation anew, so that one very possible strategy going forward would be to pay down debt so as to free our capacity for borrowing as necessary to complete other worthwhile projects in the future.
And worthwhile projects there are aplenty. For example, the Planning Task Force identified several areas where we are lacking in infrastructure facilities equal to our ambition and our quality. In the last decade we have financed—through capital gifts as well as from significant borrowings—facilities for the humanities, the visual arts, the social sciences, graduate education and counseling, legal education, library services, and student housing. Facility needs in the natural sciences, for the performing arts, student life, and additional student housing, however, as well as other needs besides, remain unmet. It is indeed a poorly kept secret that the College is in preparation for a major fund raising campaign to meet these capital needs, as well as to solicit major gifts to enhance the academic programs of the College through support for scholarships and faculty salaries. At the present time, we are in the early stages of a feasibility study to determine the extent to which the College’s donor community may be prepared to partner with us to fulfill these goals. Plans are already taking shape for several of the capital projects named in the Planning Task Force report, and that work will accelerate as the campaign takes focus. I have committed to the Board that we will bring forward a proposal for a comprehensive campaign at the meeting of the trustees in May, 2007, and we are on track to meet that goal. To the extent possible without breaching confidences, I will be sharing the findings of the feasibility study with the College community as soon as those results are available, probably in early spring.
To dispel any lingering doubts on one matter, let me point out here once again that we have fully restored the loan that was made in 2001 to the Environmental Oil Processing Technology Corporation, EVOP. Because of the extraordinary generosity and leadership of a number of major donors and our Board of Trustees, that loss has been entirely eradicated. I would not be entirely honest with you, however, if I did not acknowledge that we are still dealing with the residual consequences of the EVOP matter. That our friends and supporters so generously placed $10.5 million at our disposal gave us renewed integrity and restored our credibility at a time of intense crisis. For that, we are deeply and eternally grateful. But to be frank, circumstances now dictate that we must be all the more persuasive when next we turn to those same supporters and make our case for investing in the future of this institution. They restored $10.5 million to our reserves, our working capital, and that money has now been put to the operational uses that such reserves normally serve. That $10.5 million in gifts to Lewis & Clark is not, however, new money that can support, for example, the four endowed professorships that it might have done. Nor is it alternatively providing tuition scholarships for sixteen deserving students, every year in perpetuity. Nor did it allow us to renovate Templeton or to kick-start the campaign for a new science facility. As we develop our plans for the next campaign, we must develop for these donors and all others besides a new case for our College as the best possible focus for their philanthropy. Making our own best case for our College is a task that each of us must take up as a member of this community every day.
Turning away now from dollars and cents, let me pause to make one thing very clear. We are not now, nor do I expect at any point in the foreseeable future to be in a crisis. I am confident that we have the collective energy and capacity—just as we most certainly have the intellect and imagination—to confront and overcome the challenges that confront us. I am confident because I experience every day the spirit, the passion, and the joy that come with the pursuit of learning and that surge through this campus. Law professor Joe Miller talks about that when he says, “I hope my students become lawyers in ways that give them joy about what they do so they will want to continue learning…Learning is wonderful and easy when it’s something you enjoy. My wish for my students is that they will discover that joy.”
Which brings me to the subject of students. The Planning Task Force identified one of its six strategic goals that of attracting and retaining a well-qualified student body. On that score, I think all three schools at Lewis & Clark have an excellent story to tell, and each is on the right trajectory as we face the future. The Graduate School of Education and Counseling today enrolls a record number of students, all of them well-qualified and all of them capable of selecting other graduate programs in their field from among a growing array of offering from other institutions. That they choose to come to Lewis & Clark is testimony to the rising reputation and advancing quality of the programs in education and counseling that we offer here. Legal education in this country generally finds itself in a period of declining enrollments, but our Law School has been able to sustain not only its enrollments but also the high level of qualifications among the students we matriculate. The College of Arts and Sciences likewise continues to prosper, attracting ever larger numbers of students with ever rising and ever more diverse qualifications.
We probably pay undue attention to measures of selectivity and quality in assessing our position in the higher education sweepstakes for the best students. I am pleased to report that other, less concrete measures whereby we gauge our success in recruiting students—native curiosity, outspokenness, quirkiness, sheer contrariness, but in a nice way—also seem to me to be on the rise among our student body. I am even more pleased to report that our efforts to bring greater ethnic diversity to our student body are also paying off. In the undergraduate college, we became much more aggressive in our recruitment of underrepresented minorities last year, with the result that our number of matriculating African-American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American students has rebounded to levels not seen in over a decade at Lewis & Clark. The number of international students has likewise recovered to historic high levels. We have no intention of easing up on our efforts to maintain these trends. Our great challenges now, of course, are those of retaining these students, of ensuring their success in college and in life, and in making certain that all members of our community recognize and enjoy the benefits that come from the enriched tapestry of cultural diversity that we are weaving on our campus.
In the midst of our strategic planning process last year, we undertook a complementary examination designed to give us insights, information, and specific data about how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. In other words, what image do we hold of the three schools that form Lewis & Clark College, and what do we think of when we think of the institution as a whole? Moreover, what is the reputation of Lewis & Clark College in the broader world?
As this process of reflection and analysis moved forward, it acquired—as such processes often do—a common shorthand designation. It became known as the branding initiative. I am fully aware that different people react to such a notion of branding in different ways. So, again, let me be clear. Lewis & Clark College is not a brand, and education is not a product or a service in a crass commercial sense. At Lewis & Clark, education is our promise. Education is our promise to instill intellectual rigor and civic consciousness as active disciplines in full and fulfilling lives. It is our promise to prepare citizen-scholars of the first rank—global thinkers and leaders who engage modern issues and challenges with new ways of thinking and responding. It is our promise to steward and sustain the resources that nurture us and to celebrate the many cultures that teach us. At Lewis & Clark, education is our promise to transform lives and reform societies in the United States and around the world through the work and lives of faculty, students, staff, and alumni.
So, no, we are not seeking to market the College as a brand. In fact, we no longer speak of branding but of strategic communications. Why is it important to communicate strategically about Lewis & Clark? I noted earlier that our three primary sources of operating support are student tuition and fees; distribution from the endowment; and annual gifts from alumni, donors, and friends. It is fair to say that each of these revenue streams will continue to flow and to increase to the extent we succeed in creating and sustaining enduring relationships with everyone who is connected to Lewis & Clark. But suppose that the College could tap magically into a revenue wellspring so vast that we would never again have to solicit gifts of any size from faculty, staff, alumni, parents, trustees, donors, or friends ever again. Even if that were to happen, I for one am confident that we would still remain tireless in cultivating these relationships. For these relationships enhance our diversity, breathe life into our campus, and enrich our community in ways far beyond the merely material.
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Having said all that, however, I must nevertheless report that despite our best efforts, financial support for the College’s operating budget in the form of gifts remains well below what one might reasonably expect of an institution with our history and quality. This slide shows the amount of gifts that were booked between 2002 and 2006, as well as information on our donor community. Noteworthy is the fact that gifts for unrestricted purposes, that is, our most valuable and useable donations, fell sharply in the wake of EVOP and have yet to recover. In contrast, restricted gifts—usually for scholarships or programmatic support—have remained strong through this period, but even they have not grown with time. In nominal terms, the amount of total giving for current purposes has remained static over the last five years, but if you take inflation into account, the purchasing power of this gift stream has actually declined during these five years.
We have a major challenge ahead of us if we are to reengage our alumni and other donors in the task of moving the College into the forefront of American higher education. There are some very positive signs in this regard that give me tremendous hope. For one thing, we have been actively promoting alumni engagement in a number of ways, most notably through the creation and rejuvenation of alumni clubs around the country and around the world. You will notice on this chart that the number of alumni of record has also been on the increase over the last several years, so that we are routinely contacting more of our former students than ever before. Our publications show new verve in portraying the excellence that exists on Palatine Hill, and we have reinstated the annual roll of honor publication to give bragging rights to everyone who contributes to Lewis & Clark. You too can be in that honor roll, if you are not already.
Finally, I would note the enthusiasm that I have sensed in recent alumni events, both here on campus and in major cities all over the country and abroad. The College of Arts and Sciences homecoming event two weeks ago was officially attended by over 900 alums, and the unofficial total I suspect was half again as large. This number represents a tripling, if not quadrupling of alumni attendance in College events since Marcia and I arrived here two years ago. The ticketed attendance at the homecoming football game exceeded 1,500, a singularity at Lewis & Clark College. I want to thank all of you who in the course of your work have been in some way instrumental in reaching out with our message of renewal to our many donor communities. In the end, the strength of the Lewis & Clark on-campus community will benefit from the relationships that we build and constantly nurture with our many patrons, and especially with our alumni.
We build and sustain these relationships by sharing stories of what we are doing today. We are doing impressive things, and these impressive things are receiving the acknowledgement from the broader community that we richly deserve. In recent months, in the College of Arts and Sciences:
Mary Clare and other faculty in the Graduate School of Education and Counseling have received major funding from the Ford Foundation to support an innovative program that prepares teachers and education counselors to work with Native American populations. The graduate school has also begun implementing the Oregon New Teacher Initiative, a comprehensive program that provides critical support and development to teachers who are new to the profession. The Small Business Legal Clinic under Lisa LeSage’s guidance in the Law School received a major grant from the City of Portland and dedicated its new office space in the Pearl earlier this month. And Doug Beloof was recently acknowledged by the Oregon Business Magazine as one of the State’s “Fifty in Motion: Great Leaders for Oregon.” The world is sitting up and taking notice.
I could go on an on. Come to think of it, I have gone on and on. And of course this list is by no means exhaustive. Every day we learn of new distinctions that our faculty and staff have earned by the excellence of their work, by the creativity of their minds, and by the dedication of their spirit. By naming these few examples, I honor the work of every single faculty member and every single staff member as contributing to the ever rising reputation of this institution in our city and in the world beyond. We have a great story to tell!
In closing, I want to return to the theme of strategic communication, the theme of articulating for ourselves and for others those very special qualities that define us as a community. In so doing, please let me relate the story of one of our students, whose own story seems to me to show the spirit and energy that every one of us as members of the Lewis & Clark community might do well to emulate. One week from today, we will observe the 12th annual Mary Stuart Rogers Scholarship Banquet, which honors students whose outstanding academic achievements are complemented by qualities of leadership, dedication, integrity, compassion, sensitivity, and self-discipline. Rogers Scholarships are awarded annually to juniors and seniors in the College of Arts and Sciences, and to students in the Graduate School of Education and Counseling who are pursuing a master of arts in teaching.
One of this year’s recipients is Lilly Hankins, a member of the Class of 2007 who is majoring in sociology and anthropology and carrying a minor in Latin American studies. In reflecting on the impact that her experience at Lewis & Clark has had on her, Lilly writes the following:
My relationships with professors, students, staff, and speakers at LC have taught me ideas and facts, exposed me to theories.., and helped me develop my own ability to analyze and interpret them and then subsequently apply my own analysis. I’ve learned far more than I could even begin to enumerate…. But in addition, and I believe more importantly, these relationships have reminded me of the importance of never taking my position, knowledge, or experience for granted…. I’ve come to realize in college that knowledge is never static. It is constantly redefined, developed, examined, critiqued, and even created. This means that any of us who consider ourselves students of any subject can never stop questioning ourselves and must always recognize that our experiences are as fluid as the knowledge we hope to gain. If we do it right, we will often find ourselves dizzyingly uncomfortable, and that is when we stand the chance of truly learning something. And so I am grateful to my Lewis & Clark education for throwing me off-balance.
In the course of my remarks today, I hope to have conveyed some sense of the great strengths that reside in this institution and its people, of the challenges and opportunities that confront us as a community moving forward, and a sense of my own excitement as together we seek to unlock the potential that is within us. I hope that during your time here today you have had a moment or two of being dizzyingly uncomfortable and that you have been thrown at least a little bit off-balance. More than that, though, I hope that you have been to some extent inspired to become a strategic communicator for spreading the message about this wonderful College. Lilly Hankins speaks from the heart and conveys a fervor that is infectious. My plea to you, my take-away message, is to become more like Lilly. After our hour together today, you collectively know more, I suspect, about the state of Lewis & Clark than has any similar gathering in the history of the College. You also have heard in broad brush a small sampling of the brilliant record of recent successes that distinguish us, and I hope that you have gained a greater measure of pride because of that story. Now our job—the task of every one of us here today—is to become advocates for Lewis & Clark in the same way that Lilly is. We have a wonderful institution with a limitless future. Let’s get out there and spread the word.
Thank you for being here today.
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