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The Faculty
(Data as of 2007-2008)

St. Lawrence faculty members are demanding while employing a highly studentoriented approach to teaching and learning. They are about the business of engaging students in active learning. Every student is encouraged to develop a mentor/apprentice relationship with a faculty member, and faculty are supported in mentoring students. In such relationships students get to watch, and perhaps even collaborate with, a professor as he or she pursues his or her own scholarship. Students learn how scholars in a discipline think, how they decide what they believe to be true, and how scholarly outcomes are communicated. (President Daniel F. Sullivan, St. Lawrence, Spring 2006).

Over 99% of St. Lawrence’s 187 full-time faculty members have a Ph.D. or the highest degree possible in their discipline. St. Lawrence’s student:faculty ratio is 11:1 and 98% of the full-time faculty teach undergraduates. To be a faculty member at St. Lawrence is to have a passion for teaching, but to be an excellent teacher is to be an active scholar. As Alexander Astin, the Allan M. Cartter Professor of Higher Education at UCLA, has found, selective liberal arts colleges whose faculties are both research and teaching oriented are by far the most effective institutions of all kinds in accomplishing academic and student development outcomes. While there are many ways of measuring scholarship among the disciplines of the academy, one simple way is to consider book publication by a faculty. Since 2000, 65 books written by St. Lawrence faculty have been published. Faculty experts are regularly featured in national news media.

Today’s St. Lawrence faculty is close to being equally represented by men and women: 52% of all faculty are men and 48% of all faculty are women. Some 16.8% of faculty are people of color. Among all full-time faculty, 63% are tenured and another 31% are in tenure-track positions. The mean class size is 16 students, with only one course enrolling 101+ students, and three courses enrolling 51-100 students.

St. Lawrence has an exceptionally strong commitment to faculty development. The Center for Teaching and Learning, mentioned earlier, is a central resource for faculty, veteran and new, who wish to expand their pedagogical skills. The Dean of Academic Affairs office oversees a program of Scholarly Development Awards up to $600 per applicant and Faculty Research Fellowship Awards up to $2,500 per applicant. A generous faculty travel fund supports both national and international travel for presentation and attendance at conferences and scholarly association meetings.

St. Lawrence honors its faculty with two revered awards: the Louis and Frances Maslow Award, given annually to a faculty member who has shown the most interest in and understanding of the education and welfare of the student body as a whole; and the J. Calvin Keene Award, given to a faculty member in recognition of high standards of personal scholarship, effective teaching and moral concerns by which Dr. Keene conducted his personal and professional career. The John P. “Jack” Taylor Distinguished Career Service Award is offered to administrative staff with exemplary performance records.