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2 SUMMER 2012 | ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE
“
The General himself was very near at the time I
picked the roses. But I saw only his form, not his face
e Garden belonged to a wealthy Secesh & is very
fine. Now it is a city of tents & war horses are graz-
ing on its lawns & among its roses. e wounded of
yesterday’s battle are expected in this morning.” From
a letter byWilliam James Potter (near Petersburg,
Virginia) to his wife, June 19, 1864.
T
he least known and very essential
part of university life occurs in its
largest measure during the months
of summer. Most St. Lawrence students never
experience the emerald beauty and long day-
light of the North Country’s pleasantest season,
but that is not really so rare an impression for
them to forsake because there are other garden
places in the earth, in the summer.
Rather, students, alumni and parents
may not realize summer’s importance to the
St. Lawrence faculty. It is the time when college
professors return to their first love of scholar-
ship.
Much skepticism has been expressed in
recent years about the life, tenure and benefits
of faculties. e assumption holds that the
vacations are long, the work pressures light, and
the days of ease and plenty abound.
Unfortunately, the criticism has been
overblown in caricature and lampoon. Also, in
response, the professorial self-defense has gener-
ally defaulted to a quiet surrender as the popu-
lar misperceptions are heaped higher. College
presidents, however, as residents in “the house
of the interpreter,” should seize fresh occasion
to clarify the expectations of how faculty spend
their time, particularly when they are not in the
classroom for many weeks at a stretch.
With our daughter representing the fifth
generation of her family to be called “teacher,”
I can personally dispel the tired joke that the
three best reasons to be a teacher are June,
July and August. On the contrary, even out of
view from their students, summertime for our
St. Lawrence faculty is a period of intense
thinking, deep reflection and concentrated
study. Scholarship, broadly defined as the
pursuits of research, creativity and the marking
of ideas, matters passionately to college teach-
ers; this piece of their work develops their craft
as teachers more than any other professional
activity. e best teachers on campus are often
the most scholarly. Summers as a boy call to
mind my own college-professor father hunched
over a manual typewriter preparing notes and
drafts. I can still hear the percussive bip-bip-
crackety-tat, like a jazz player’s lick, punctuated
by a dinging bell as the carriage reached the
end of the row.
Once the summer’s honeysuckle taste of
scholarship has first whetted the appetite for
finding things out, then even the quest for
knowing the smallest degrees of detail will give
a sense of excitement, fullness and fulfillment
that will, in time, also make learning conta-
gious for students. Perhaps the chase is close
to an addiction, but the pleasure of being a
full-time scholar again yields incomparable
delight, which come late August is translated
and conveyed into the best courses of study our
students may ever enter and know.
From my own experience, I saved an extract
of a Civil War letter as a personal reminder of a
June day many decades removed. At a scholar’s
table, I had spent countless hours in a library
reading longhand letters from a New England
family that no historian had ever seen. e
lines above trigger a particular feeling of “get-
ting it”: the general mentioned is Grant; the
writer’s best friend from college had just been
killed by an exploding cannon shell; his wife
is pregnant; and inside the letter, as I unfolded
it, were pressed rose petals. Summer has never
been the same.
WI LL IAM L . FOX ’ 75
Tending the Garden of Scholarship
Publisher
Tom Evelyn
Editor-in-Chief
Neal S. Burdick ’72
University Writer
Meg Bernier ’07, M ’09
Photographer
Tara Freeman
Class Notes Editor
Sharon Henry
News Editor
Macreena Doyle
Sports Editor
Wally Johnson
Designer
Jessica Rood
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ST. LAWRENCE
University Magazine
A WORD FROM THE PRESIDENT