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About Lehigh > President Alice P. Gast > Speeches and Writings > Founder's Day Address

 

Founder’s Day Address - October 20, 2006
From Canals to Rails: Opportunities in Challenges
Alice P. Gast

Welcome to the 128th Founder’s Day ceremony. I hope that you will take away from this day a deeper sense of what Asa Packer began...and a recognition of Packer’s legacy today, as we honor our student leaders, faculty chairs and our generous donors.

I’d like to begin by remembering the vision of our Founder, Asa Packer, and affirming and celebrating his reasons for founding this great university and I’d like to draw parallels between his vision and ours today.

Asa Packer’s world in the 1860’s included a nation divided by differing visions of the future. This disturbed him, and the Civil War greatly strengthened his convictions about America and what it should be. Packer was a quiet man; his formal education was unremarkable; he was deeply pious. Yet, he was a strong supporter of the thinking man, who used Reason and courage to improve the world. In his later years, he was elected to serve two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, and almost became the governor of Pennsylvania. He was called Judge, by even those who did not know him, and he was considered the richest man in the Commonwealth at the time. From his founding of the Lehigh Valley Railroad to the establishment of Lehigh University, Asa Packer took the lessons he learned early in life to look far ahead, to envision what was around the bend.

Asa Packer was, in my estimation, a risk-taker, who saw future opportunities in current challenges. He saw that transportation by canal boat was limited in speed, capacity and reach, and so he moved into the transportation revolution at the time: rail. He also saw that a strong region and nation required an educated workforce; this revelation drove him to put a substantial fortune into the founding of Lehigh University.

He had enough success, experience in management, and understanding of America’s needs by the time he founded Lehigh University in 1865 that his contributions were more than philanthropic. This philanthropist knew that his wealth came with a moral responsibility quite apart from self-interest. He knew that his wealth was needed to promote the work of building a nation.

To quote our retired dean and historian W. Ross Yates, “Like other industrial pioneers in the great land of opportunity, Packer saw a wealth of resources of forest, field, and subsoil, and a poverty of skills to develop them.” Asa Packer recognized that Lehigh needed to provide a liberal and scientific education for practical service in order to fill this need.

Looking at Lehigh today, 141 years, from the year 1865 when Lehigh University was founded, we see several important public confirmations of Lehigh’s current place among great American higher education institutions.

• Lehigh is consistently listed among the top tier of national universities, with high marks for our undergraduate student retention, student selectivity and small classes.
• Lehigh’s graduate programs in education and engineering rank among the top programs in the nation
• And, the College of Business and Economics is receiving deserved attention for its shining undergraduate business programs.
• Lehigh University today benefits greatly from the support of its graduates: we rank at the top among the major American universities in the percentage of alumni making contributions and supporting our initiatives. Leading this vast achievement are all the donors listed on the Leadership Plaza and those being honored here today: your gifts are an important statement on how much you love Lehigh and how important it is to carry on Asa’s legacy for generations to come.

In addition to these visible accolades for the university, we need to understand and celebrate the internal strength, quality and conviction that we share at Lehigh.

We are a formidable group of individuals with a commitment to our mission and our core values. e share a strong sense of purpose, and this is apparent even to a newcomer who is learning "the Lehigh way."

This sense of purpose that I have witnessed includes a strong dedication to making a Lehigh education as complete and well-rounded as possible. It means teaching fundamentals while providing practical experiences and problems to solve that are meaningful in our time. It is demonstrated by the tremendous accomplishments of our alumni as they take their life experiences at Lehigh and successfully navigate the twists and turns of a great life. It means that we turn out "risk takers" like Asa Packer who see opportunity in challenges.

Today is a day when we gather to congratulate all of you in this audience who, in some way, have contributed to this commitment and these successes and have paved the way for the future.

It is extremely fitting that we will begin our celebration by recognizing those whose work and contributions are having a tremendous impact on our future. We will begin by recognizing our trustees. Some of you may only know trustees in the abstract, but tonight you will meet these dedicated men and women who spend countless hours helping to shape Lehigh’s future. They also share much of their own hard earned money by investing in Lehigh so that it can make as big a difference in the lives of current and future students as it has on their lives.

We will then pay tribute to our Leadership Plaza donors, whose vision and generosity have made a significant impact on Lehigh that will endure well into the future. This year we have the opportunity to specially honor those whose contributions exceed $10M; you will notice that their names are now emblazoned with gold in leadership plaza. The first such benefactor was Asa Packer whose 1865 gift of $500,000 could now be estimated as a gift of $54M if he were to make it today (this is a very hard calculation to make and we can only imagine the magnitude of a $500K gift in 1865, by far the largest donation to an institution of higher education of its time). After recognition of a special new administrator, we will celebrate our new and established endowed chairs.

Lehigh’s hallmark is a faculty that is committed to providing an exemplary classical education as well as pursuing forefront scholarship, research and creative works. Our philosophy is one that has been true since our Founding: We integrate creativity, scholarship, research and classroom education; we compete aggressively for funding; we are attending to the new needs of the nation and the world; and we believe in an environment rich in educational opportunities.

We exercise this philosophy by attracting the very best students, faculty and staff. Endowed chairs are among the most important ways to recruit and retain the finest faculty. To hold an endowed chair is one of the highest honors an institution can bestow upon its faculty. It is very exciting to be applauding so many chair holders this evening. These chairs have been generously created by our benefactors whose names you see carved into leadership plaza. Our ability to shape our future is directly linked to our success in attracting and supporting distinguished faculty.

The fact that fewer than ten percent of Lehigh professors hold fully endowed chairs means that we lag behind our peers who report 20 to 40 percent of fully endowed chairs at their schools. Clearly, this tells us that we have more work to be done and it is up to us to inspire the creation of more prestigious chaired positions. I believe that our sense of purpose, our commitment to educating the finest students in ways that allow them to solve important problems, provides ample motivation for the support of endowed chairs. We will need to aggressively pursue endowment support for professorships and equally aggressively use these positions to continue to recruit the finest colleagues we can attract.

It is fitting that we use this commemoration of our founder, a leader in his time, to acknowledge the leadership of our remarkable students. It is a privilege to be able to pay tribute to the student officers from the Classes of 2007 through 2010, the Officers of the Student Senate and the Association of Student Alumni Officers who are here today, and to recognize the leadership they are providing to this university. I hope that they will feel a special bond with all of the leaders who have gone before them, laying the foundation ¡V or shall I say, laying the rails, for what we have here today. I want to thank them all for the contributions they are making to Lehigh.

Perhaps one day some of the student leaders sitting here today will return to Packer chapel for another Founder’s day ceremony to be recognized for having their names engraved on Leadership Plaza or to celebrate the establishment of a newly endowed chair.

Today I am also looking around the bend at the challenges that we at Lehigh must look upon as opportunities. I am asking what our transition from canals to rails will be. Here are a few thoughts of things I believe Lehigh University will rise to address much in the way Asa Packer would if he were here today:

• First, we face new and unprecedented competition from around the world. The United States is ranked 20th in the world for the percent of its college-age population earning university degrees in engineering and the natural sciences. Other countries are creating new universities, and competing with us to attract the best and brightest from around the world. A report made this week by the American Council on Education says, that while the United States increased its international-student enrollment by 17 percent from the 1999 to 2004, others, such as Australia and Germany attracted over 40 percent more international students, and Japan’s foreign enrollment grew by 108 percent. And China, the world’s largest source of international students saw a rapid 213 percent increase in international enrollment and is on its way to becoming a significant host country. Clearly, this is a challenge and an opportunity for Lehigh. We are challenged to understand and engage in higher education that spans the world and prepares our students for the future. We have an opportunity to be both a host for and a source of international students. We are embracing this opportunity to expand our horizons today.
• Second, the global energy appetite is increasing at a rate that far outpaces the development of new energy sources. As the rest of the world strives to bring their standard of living into the realm of ours, we worry about the global environment and impacts on climate. I believe that many concerted efforts involving deep thinkers from broad areas of expertise are needed to meet this challenge and seize this opportunity. Our contributions to this will be important and we are working on integrating the teaching and research activities that will rise to this challenge.
• Finally, while the US population surpassed 300 million just this week, we face problems in educating our nation’s children to a level where they can bring their talents to bear on the world challenges. Higher education faces a call to reach out to the youth of our country and to inspire them to seek, and to help them to attain, an education and life experience in an intellectually rich environment that prepares them for the competitive world we live in. Technology has advanced knowledge to every corner of the world, and America is competing on a flat playing field with too many of our important players on the sidelines. We must take this challenge as an opportunity to lead in the effort to solve this problem.

All of us at Lehigh are called upon not only to look around the bend, but to help build the "American railroad" of the 21st century. We must move from our own canals and familiar pathways to a broader and more encompassing horizon.

We must stand for important principles: We must improve public education. We must strengthen long-term basic research. We must seek the best and brightest students from all corners of the world; and we must solve problems with innovative ideas that make a real difference. To meet these challenges, we must collaborate and integrate our resources. Just as our new recipients of endowed chairs and professorships show us what is possible, we must strive for what more must be done.

I believe that if Asa Packer were sitting here today, he would be prodding us to move from our familiar pathways and canals to set out to find new opportunities from some of the world’s challenges.