A higher ed calling
William L. Fox, St. Lawrence University’s 18th president, discusses his tenure leading the university and his own undergraduate experience as a member of the class of 1975 in his Canton office last month. Photo by Justin Sorensen, NNY Business.
William Fox, SLU ’75, leads university steeped in tradition to new, lasting heights
When St. Lawrence University president William L. Fox first arrived on campus in 1971 for a visit during his senior year of high school, he instantly knew that he’d found his undergraduate home. Fast-forward some 38 years to 2009, and Mr. Fox, a 1975 graduate, made a serendipitous return to campus as the university’s 18th president. With the nation’s economy in a tailspin, he’d take the reins at the storied institution while facing incredible challenges as the university’s endowment plunged 35 percent, losing nearly $100 million. But, as Mr. Fox tells it, the perseverance of an academic institution revered by its alumni helped to carry it through hard times. Now in his seventh year at the helm, Mr. Fox and the team he leads have set a course of innovation and adaptation that he believes will propel St. Lawrence well into the future. We sat down with Mr. Fox last month for a conversation about what makes St. Lawrence a jewel in the crown of higher education.
NNYB: You’re a St. Lawrence alum. As a young man growing up in Washington, D.C., what lead you to Canton?
FOX: It’s one of those happy accidents of life. I had known I was going to college, had particular interests in a smaller institution. Family circumstances prevented me from doing a traditional college tour with my father and mother. I went to a very large metropolitan high school, so I was the kind of student nobody really worried about. I was a good student. Counselors just didn’t have to give me much time. As a result of the gap in the college search process, our family minister advised me. He had done a lot of college speaking all over the U.S. and recommended three or four colleges in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Looking back, he played me like a trout on a fly rod. I asked him, what about your alma mater, St. Lawrence? I’ve heard you talk about it my entire life. He told me I might like it there. A couple weeks later, he called the house and said ‘I’m going up to St. Lawrence, would you like to go?’ I knew the instant I set foot on campus that October afternoon that this was the place for me. There was no other place I wanted to go.
NNYB: SLU has an impressive alumni network. What inspires many alums to give so generously to their alma mater?
FOX: There’s a tradition of belonging at St. Lawrence that I would argue differentiates us from most other American colleges and universities. Part of it is defined by our geography. This is not a location that is anywhere near metropolitan distractions and therefore students come here with a certain intensity of experience that lasts for a lifetime. Lifelong friendships are formed here, quite naturally. I could say more about the founding of St. Lawrence, the people and the culture they created, which has leant itself to that kind of community building, but we’re 160 years old and I’ve known it for over 25 percent of its history, as a graduate, and it in so many ways had that indelible way of marking all of us who called each other Laurentians with this very powerful tradition of friendship.
NNYB: You have a variety of published essays on the necessity of liberal arts learning. At its core, SLU is a liberal arts school. How does a liberal arts education best prepare students for such a wide range of vocations?
FOX: A liberal arts education is the finest education available in the world and there is no better preparation for a career, but more importantly a better preparation for a life; a life of the mind, a life in a community. I would say that the St. Lawrence version of a liberal arts education, what I’ve been calling the St. Lawrence three ‘Rs,’ would begin with relationships, their intents. I promise every entering class that every single student will have a professor or a coach or a dean who will forever change their life, the one who they’ll never forget. More importantly, that person will know them, will know their name. They may have more than one of those kinds of key mentors, but that scale of learning works and St. Lawrence has the ability to deliver that for every student. The second ‘R’ I would call rhetoric. While we could say all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, I don’t mean rhetoric in the sense that the Greeks and Romans taught. I mean the ability to communicate and at St. Lawrence that is across the curriculum, the presentation skills, the writing skills, the ability to think with confidence, the ability to disagree with a professor is encouraged. That is notable when employers tell us that they see graduates from the big brand-name institutions and our students stand apart because they have this capacity for being quick on their feet, being able to handle the written language, and demonstrate an oral competency. The third ‘R‘ in this framework is research. Our students, when they graduate, ought to know a scholar when they see one. They ought to have done some research themselves. That kind of pragmatic liberal arts has always been a part of the St. Lawrence experience. It creates leadership skills.
NNYB: A surprising number of students go on to medical school, go into the sciences. There’s a perception that a liberal arts education isn’t science, medicine or engineering. How does this type of education prepare people to become successful in the sciences?
FOX: We probably should say liberal arts and sciences. Every student who comes through St. Lawrence, even the English major or the music major, is going to have some exposure to the scientific method. Our placement rate is 97 percent. There is not another college or university in America that has a higher placement rate than St. Lawrence. There is a disproportionately high number of science Ph.D.’s produced in America, and M.D.s, that come out of this kind of institution. The reason for that is that when you are taking organic chemistry you’re not in a class with a graduate assistant and 125 other students. You’re with a master teacher who is a Ph.D. scientist with a lot of years of experience. That quality of opportunity is what I think accounts for the very high success rate of our graduates who have gone into the sciences and into medicine. The current head of NYU would tell you as he did our graduates a few years ago, to be a world-class medical scientist it doesn’t matter what your GPA was in biology and chemistry; for him it was the fact that he took studio art, he took a bunch of studies from a premiere scholar of the New Testament, he had leadership opportunities and he would say that’s what made him the kind of physician and researcher that he is today.
NNYB: In recognition of your leadership in higher education, the Council of Independent Colleges elected you to its Board of Trustees in January 2011. And in 2015, you were appointed to the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities Board of Trustees. How have those experiences helped you as a leader at SLU?
FOX: It’s important to know other people who are in this same line of work, other college presidents, and to work together because, especially in the liberal arts arena today we have not had the best press. Some of it is misunderstanding the tradition; some of it’s been miscast as an easy foil. There have been a number of public officials who’ve made fun of liberal arts education, better to be a welder than a philosopher kind of emanation. With that kind of adversity in the marketplace and, honestly, that kind of just gross misinterpretation, it’s better to stand together than to stand apart. The American liberal arts college with a residential component does not exist on any other continent in the world. It is distinctively and historically American. These are the crown jewels of American higher education, so those of us involved in the leadership of these institutions have to understand and share our best ideas with each other.
NNYB: A St. Lawrence experience, you say, is distinguished from other university experiences by a deeply rooted sense of community with shared values and respect for diversity, emphasizing the “Three R’s.” What is most important about that philosophy in the development of future leaders?
FOX: There is an important thing that happens at St. Lawrence that makes it a happy campus. I don’t mean happy in the sense of summer camp. I mean happy in that there’s joy and thinking deeply and with a lot of energy; hard ideas, hard thoughts and having the joy of discovery. The kick of discovery, as Richard Feinman called it. The peer effect here is really exceptional. When you have energetic students and they’re your friends, there is something that is symbiotic that goes on as part of that experience. You may not take a class in economics, but you’re going to know a lot about the chairman of the department who’s a phenomenal teacher and scholar. All of that is part of the package that makes up the St. Lawrence liberal arts way.
NNYB: You are also a senior lecturer in the Department of History. Why is it important that you maintain direct instructional contact with students?
FOX: It’s something that students deserve at a place like St. Lawrence to know the president and not just as a picture in a magazine. I eat lunch in the dining halls as often as I can. I attend athletic contests and performing arts events. I love to support students and they know I’m there. For me, I couldn’t do the job with credibility if I didn’t have that contact with students. I have so much pleasure in it. It’s one of the rewards of the job.
NNYB: St. Lawrence has a total enrollment of around 2,500 students from 45 states and 47 countries, the broadest geographical representation ever in the university’s 160-year history. Currently, 360 students are alumni legacies. What makes SLU a family tradition?
FOX: I don’t take it for granted, but it’s been that way for a long time. It’s a tremendous vote of confidence because these are the families who know us best. If they had any skepticism about St. Lawrence it would show up in that forum of the admissions market. Part of is that when you graduate from St. Lawrence you graduate not just belonging to a tradition, to a sense of place and these lifelong relationships, but you graduate with an enthusiasm that gets transplanted from one genetic code. Some of these sons and daughters, they have it. From the day they’re born they’re wearing St. Lawrence logo gear.
NNYB: The Class of 2019 will be among the top five largest during the last 30 years. Has SLU made a deliberate choice to stay small and not over expand?
FOX: I think there are strategic size questions that are always going to be hanging above us as our society changes and adapts. There is a threshold of scale that if it’s too small it won’t work financially. That’s a sad fact, but that’s reality. I feel pretty confident that 2,500 is small enough to keep that intimacy alive and intense, and yet large enough to feel like there is a vitality that’s out of proportion to its size.
NNYB: You were named president in 2009, only the 18th in 160 years. When you look back at what you’ve achieved, what are you most proud of?
FOX: When I was first contacted by the search committee about the opportunity to lead St. Lawrence, I wasn’t instantly drawn to it because of one test question that was in front of me. I was at an institution where I was really making a difference. I had to be certain that if I came to St. Lawrence that we could make a difference. I don’t know how one measures that. My predecessor did a brilliant job and I stand on the shoulders of a lot of significant leaders at St. Lawrence. I help when I’ve had my turn. That’s what will be the result that we made a difference and not just in the way things look, but that I was able to touch some lives at an important point in either a young faculty member’s career or in a student’s formative stage of getting ready for the world they’re going to work in.
NNYB: How important to your success are those you surround yourself with?
FOX: I have the really remarkable good fortune to have talented colleagues in every single division. Experienced, creative, independent, I think that’s an important concept in a team where you have people who are not like-minded. They approach problems with different intellectual frameworks sometimes and that makes us much stronger. The other simple principle I have with our senior staff is that all titles get checked at the door. We’re very egalitarian. We’ve got to help each other, so we cross-pollinate a lot. Somebody who is in charge of student life will know a lot about admissions work. Somebody who is the academic dean is going to know a lot about the work of the chief financial officer. That kind of complement is part of why we’re so successful.
NNYB: At some point you have to be willing to take a risk and realize it might not be successful. What’s the culture of risk-taking like at SLU?
FOX: We’ve been pioneers for a long time. We were founded with the experimental idea that men and women could study together. That was a defining moment in the sense that we have always aired on the side that you can die by caution and you can only live by being in motion. We are willing to take risks in the curriculum, in the way we use our campus and its facilities. Fifteen years ago the St. Lawrence board placed a huge bet on the quality of our facilities, the new science center, the athletic complex and improvement in the arts area. There’s already a predisposition to taking risks. Right now, we’re looking at programs that would affect the improvement of the sophomore year. The sophomore year experience around the country is typically not a great one and we’re no different. We want to make sure that’s a better experience, so we’re ready to pioneer programmatically in that part of the college career. We’re looking at ways we can use our interdisciplinary spirit to create fields of study that combine things that are already in place.
NNYB: You joined SLU as we were just starting to dig out from the Great Recession. How did that impact operations? To what extent does the university rely on donors and alumni?
FOX: I would still say the economy is stuck in neutral. We learned a lot through that experience. Our endowment had been damaged significantly by about 35 percent. We lost $100 million. That changes everything in your operating assumptions. Our endowment is a little engine that pulls a long train. It supports financial aid. It supports endowed professorships. It allows for a lot of important programs to take place. We had to realign our operating budget and we did that with good shared governance. Internal task groups led by faculty with other staff members and students participated in developing a response. That gave us the framework to take steps to contain costs and leverage revenue where we could. The outcome of that was a strategic shift that let us understand better our capacity that we could incrementally add enrollment. We had a chance to size ourselves up and one of the results was the building of Kirk Douglas Hall with 154 beds. It was an exciting project. We did it through self-funding and donor support. We did not go to the credit market to fund a new residence hall, which is very unusual. So, we came out of that stronger than we would’ve otherwise been if we didn’t face that adversity together. We realized just how strong and resilient we are and also understood that our future has really got to have a key priority that I call financial equilibrium, which is not the same thing as balancing budgets. It’s got to be much more dynamic and elastic and nimble than that. We had opted to do some innovative things that did not require initially large amounts of seed money.
NNYB: As a leader managing a crisis like that what were some important steps that got you through?
FOX: I would say several things. I was new, but I’d had experience as a president elsewhere and the things that I learned before coming to St. Lawrence, my first principles, stayed with me. You have to be transparent. You have to really let people inside your thinking and listen very closely to their ideas, their reactions and reflections. The communication was a critical part of our success. The public forums that I held on campus, the chance I had with alumni to explain where we were. People felt very well informed.
NNYB: How do you defend financial decisions like raising tuition?
FOX: I think it is misunderstood by lumping aggregates that really need to be pulled apart because they are very different. Most student debt is from proprietary institutions that are for-profit or it’s graduate school, law school or medical school where there is very low default rate and very healthy opportunity to return on the investment.
NNYB: How has the financial aid climate changed?
FOX: When you look at the service economy, of which higher education is part, our rise in cost is an exact parallel of the cost of dental care or a haircut. The curve is the same over the last several decades. One of the changes that really confused the marketplace is price differentiation and that is what financial aid accomplishes. If you start with the premise that everybody at St. Lawrence, including those families who can pay the published, comprehensive fee, even those families are subsidized because the true cost versus price is different. The true cost of educating a single student at St. Lawrence is about $77,000 a year. Nobody pays that much, but there are differences in what people pay. We try to work with families to find that price point that is affordable. Our students who take on loans, which is part of the financial aid picture today, when they graduate they’re right at the bulls-eye of the U.S. average for all college graduates, including public institutions, at about $27,000 a year. I would argue that’s a lot of money, but I also remind people it’s an investment that only increases in value. The average cost for a wedding in the U.S. today, even in the north country, it’s going to be that or more. One day of your life. America’s most popular vehicle, the Ford F-150 pickup truck, they cost that or more. There are a lot of ways to think of this. It’s a question we agonize over.
NNYB: What is your partnership like with SUNY Canton and other local universities?
FOX: It’s a very healthy one. We share a lot of common ground. We don’t compete with each other in the admissions market and we collaborate with each other in every possible way, except when St. Lawrence and Clarkson play hockey. That’s not very collaborative, but it’s great for the north country. We pack both arenas when those two teams match up.
NNYB: How prepared are you seeing the quality of students coming into the freshman class?
FOX: I thought we were pretty good when I came in, very talented, smart people. It was the baby boom. We were the sputnik generation. Most of us came with good math skills, good English. I think these students are better today than they were a generation ago in many ways. They’re different, but I think they’re preparation is very solid. When they’re doing as juniors some collaborative research in their major, the first whiff of something that’s kind of professional, they’re at a level that would have been graduate school level when I was in my formative years. That’s not just in the sciences; I see that in the humanities, and in the arts. This is a very impressive generation. In many ways they’re more worldly. They’re definitely more altruistic, they want to give back, they want to make a difference and they care deeply. They want to know the world and we help them get the first taste of knowing the world. We want them to be travelers. In America, fewer than 40 percent carry passports. Canada is about 60 percent. At St. Lawrence 80-plus percent of our students arrive with passports. They come well-matched for what we hope they’ll do.
NNYB: What’s the best business advice you’ve ever followed in your career?
FOX: I’m a historian. I never took an accounting class. I tease our trustees that what were you thinking, I make my living with words. I spend most of my days looking at charts and spreadsheets and budgets. I’ve gotten pretty good at that. You can get really absorbed by that and it can be very seductive and addictive. It’s fun. You can solve problems by understanding how to operate, administer and run things. But the best advice is to think big and keep asking yourself if you’re ideas are big enough. That’s the place where we are right now with St. Lawrence with our leadership, with our trustees, with our donors, with our alumni and with our students. It’s a very exciting time.
NNYB: What do you think the next 20 years will bring for St. Lawrence?
FOX: St. Lawrence is going to be even stronger and better known in the next 20 years. Our reputation is moving in the right direction. We’re global in nature. When I came to St. Lawrence, like most colleges, even Harvard, very provincial. Most of Harvard’s students came from Massachusetts or Connecticut. While they’re a giant market leader, we have followed that same trend and it’s only going to continue. My view when I came to St. Lawrence as president was we needed a campus that looks like the world and that’s what we’re building. That would be my expectation that we will be much more diverse in 20 years. I would venture to say that the quality of the institution will be world class.
The William L. Fox file
Age: 62
Job: 18th president of St. Lawrence University and senior lecturer in the Department of History
Family: Wife, Lynn; daughter, Hallie, 28; and brother, David
Hometown: Washington, D.C., native; Canton resident
Education: Bachelor’s degree, St. Lawrence University, 1975; Master of Divinity, Harvard University, 1978 and Ph.D. in American religious history, George Washington University, 1989
Professional: 20 years as a minister in the Universalist Church; faculty member at Claremont Theological School, Montgomery College, and Howard University; president and senior lecturer in philosophy, religion, and history at Culver-Stockton College in Missouri, 2003-2009; named president of St. Lawrence University, 2009
Last Book Read: “Empire of Cotton,” by Sven Beckert and “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War,” by Robert J. Gordon
— Interview by Ken Eysaman. Edited for length and clarity to fit this space.