The Marquis de Lafayette was a no-show for his 250th birthday party. Fortunately, historical interpreter Loic Barnieu filled in admirably, aided by Revolutionary War re-enactors who set up camp on the Quad, where hundreds of students, faculty, and staff gathered in the early evening to enjoy a feast fit for a marquis.

The celebration on September 6 also had a serious side. In delivering the John L. Hatfield ‘67 Lecture that afternoon, historian Lloyd Kramer, America’s leading authority on the Marquis, reminded us of our special obligation. “Lafayette is an appropriate name for a 21st-century American college,” he said, “in part because an outstanding college must remain deeply involved with the political and cultural issues that were so important in Lafayette’s life.”

I take considerable pride in the depth of our ongoing involvement with those issues. Although our efforts occasionally fall short of the level of excellence to which we aspire, I can think of no better way for Lafayette College to honor its namesake than by constantly striving to honor his highest ideals, including his commitment to service, to global citizenship, to the unfettered exchange of ideas, to social and intellectual pluralism, and to fundamental human rights.

If you have not yet seen “Darfur: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis,” a video that is available as a podcast on the College’s website, I urge you to do so. Written by Christopher Haight ‘09 and created through the efforts of more than a hundred students, faculty, staff, and trustees, the video powerfully conveys, through narrative and imagery, some of the ways in which the Lafayette community is speaking out and taking action in response to serious human-rights violations.

On November 8, shortly after the video was completed, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof spoke to a large audience in Colton Chapel about the genocide in Darfur. The lecture and video were coordinated through our Policy Studies program to support the resolution that Lafayette’s trustees adopted in 2006 to heighten awareness within the College community of the abhorrent violations of human rights committed by the Sudanese government.

Members of the board joined with faculty, alumni, students, and outside experts to examine other pressing issues during the “Visions of the Energy Future” conference in October. Co-sponsored by Policy Studies, the Power Engineering Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the program addressed a wide range of energy-related themes, including clean-fuel technology, sustainability, and environmental awareness.

While the focus of that conference was global, serious attention is also being paid to energy-related concerns that directly affect our campus. Lafayette received—and, I would say, deserved—a D- grade on the 2007 Sustainability Report Card, which measures how well 200 American and Canadian colleges and universities with the largest endowments are doing in such areas as recycling, energy conservation, and “green building” and in their campus investment practices. We simply must do better. George Xiques of our Plant Operations Department has been asked to lead the effort to identify and implement appropriate measures.

Much of the pressure to improve Lafayette’s sustainability record comes directly from our students. Over the past two semesters an interdisciplinary Technology Clinic team developed an environmentally sustainable plan for Lafayette. Their innovative ideas make us even more excited about the prospects for using our limited resources more responsibly. Other efforts include the work done by Margaret Garcia ‘07 and Benjamin Flath ’07 to increase the focus on sustainability principles in undergraduate engineering courses at Lafayette and elsewhere.

Our students also understand the value of connecting with the local community. Several dozen members of the Class of 2011 arrived on campus in advance of the formal orientation program in order to volunteer in the Easton community—an “amazing, inspirational week of service” according to Joanna Norelli ‘08, who coordinated this year’s program. Members of the new class who enrolled in the First-Year Seminar “Taking It to the Streets: The Theory and Practice of Community Arts in Urban America” enjoyed another unique opportunity to learn about—and learn from—our community.

All of us in the campus community are enriched by the growing diversity of voices, ideas, interests, and perspectives among us.

Last semester the Office of Intercultural Development launched Intercultural Horizons, a publication whose first issue addressed the theme of “Globalizing the Racial Line” through stimulating articles and artwork by students and staff. The important contributions of our African-American alumni, students, and faculty were celebrated last winter through the inaugural issue of The McDonogh Report. The 2007 Presidential Speaker Series on Diversity attracted a large audience for a presentation by civil-rights activist and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier. Lectures and publications of this type make a significant contribution to the broader campus dialogue.

As we work to create an educational environment that is even more conducive to social and intellectual pluralism, one of our specific goals is to achieve greater diversity within our student body. In 2007 Lafayette received two grants in support of that effort: $50,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help us develop plans for improving our success in recruiting students from underrepresented groups and $100,000 from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation to endow a scholarship that will enable us to lessen the loan burden for students of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

Lafayette is by no means alone in seeking to improve diversity and access. Last semester the president of Pomona College and I co-chaired a closed-door meeting during which 40 or so presidents of leading colleges and universities spoke candidly about the challenging and changing environment. That discussion, which was part of a day-long symposium on leadership, diversity, and higher education sponsored by Goldman, Sachs & Co., was followed by a presentation by Deborah Bial, the president and founder of the Posse Foundation (and Lafayette’s 2006 commencement speaker).

I can think of no better model for connecting diversity and leadership than that provided by the Posse Scholars program. The members of Lafayette’s Posse program—from New York City and Washington, D.C.—have an impact far greater than their numbers would suggest. Those students not only succeed here; they light the place up. Now we must find ways to take even greater advantage of the unique qualities they add to campus life. We were enormously proud last June when a segment of the “Shades of America” series on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric featured our Posse seniors.

One of those 2007 Posse graduates, Pepper Prize winner Danielle Bero, is now teaching high-school students in Indonesia under the auspices of the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship program. Although Danielle admits to having felt homesick as well as liberated during her time there, she credits the opportunities she had for travel to Namibia, South Africa, and Guatemala as a Lafayette undergraduate with giving her the “strength and knowledge” to adjust to a very different culture.

Danielle was one of three seniors to earn a prestigious Fulbright appointment. Her classmate Adam Callaghan holds an English Teaching Assistantship in Germany, while Lisa Lovallo is in Mexico with support from a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Binational Business Grant. Young alumna Briana Niblick ‘06, who also received a Fulbright award in 2007, is spending the year in Austria, where she is studying environmental engineering and teaching.

As the post-graduate activities of Briana, Lisa, Adam, and Danielle suggest, Lafayette students do more than just learn about and visit other countries. They make a difference there. Our Engineers Without Borders chapter, for example, has focused for several years on providing clean drinking water to Lagunitas and La Fortuna, two rural villages in central Honduras. Last winter the EWB team received a $10,000 grant from the Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace program and used the funds to help the residents of Lagunitas develop a more sustainable economy.

While we encourage students to take advantage of opportunities for travel and study abroad, their global awareness is also heightened by the presence of noted international figures on campus. “Facing the Chinese Century,” a two-day conference hosted by the College last March, brought distinguished scholars, journalists, and policy makers to Easton to address such issues as the transformation of China’s cities and technological infrastructure. In September Francisco Flores, the president of El Salvador from 1999-2004, examined some of the special challenges faced by developing nations.

The “Lives of Liberty” lecture series, which the College is sponsoring as part of the 250th birthday celebration, is focusing on the global dimension of the Marquis de Lafayette’s life and influence. In the inaugural lecture, author David McCullough examined the special ties that bind America and France. Ron Chernow, the award-winning biographer of Alexander Hamilton, spoke in October, and we look forward to addresses by Civil War scholar James McPherson, historian Simon Schama, writer and activist Gloria Steinem, and novelist Salman Rushdie this coming semester.

Lafayette is immensely fortunate to have the human capital, the first-rate programs and facilities, and the financial backing to offer educational opportunities of the type to which I make reference throughout this report.

We are equally fortunate in being able to renew and augment those resources. For example, we recently invested more than $4.5 million to improve the Information Technology infrastructure that provides essential support for the College’s academic mission. The program of residence-hall improvements continued last year through the upgrading of Watson Courts. In 2007 we also renovated the McCracken Varsity House at Metzgar Fields and completed the $23 million Fisher Stadium project, including the construction of the Bourger Varsity Football House.

The fall Lafayette Alumni News outlined the key features of the ambitious strategic plan that was adopted by the faculty and the board in October. (The full plan is available on Lafayette’s website.) This plan commits the College to substantial additional investments in people, programs, and facilities over the next five to eight years to secure Lafayette’s position among the nation’s premier small colleges.

I am delighted to report that several financial commitments have already been made in support of key initiatives, including major pledges from alumni Peter S. d’Aubermont ‘73 (the life sciences), David M. Roth ‘70 (endowed professorships), Walter “Bud” Scherr ‘78 (engineering and other needs), and Walter A. Scott ‘59 (academic programming). The $6 million commitment from David Roth will endow three professorships, generating essential early momentum as we work to implement the plan’s single most ambitious objective: the addition of 35 faculty positions (an increase of approximately 20 percent). This fall we were also pleased to receive a three-year grant of $300,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support faculty innovation and collaboration.

This strategic focus on faculty is expressly designed to strengthen the Lafayette model of education. By adding teaching power in critical areas while keeping the size of the student body at its current level, we will increase opportunities for independent and small-group learning and individualized student-faculty collaborative work. The additional faculty will also enhance our flexibility in developing appropriate interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary offerings.

The prospect of adding to our already superb faculty is exciting indeed. One of the things that most impressed me about Lafayette when I became its president was the outstanding record of faculty scholarship. Every issue of the alumni magazine highlights faculty-authored books and other work of exceptionally high quality. Our faculty are also highly regarded as leaders in their fields. In 2007 Sharon Jones received an Engineering Education Excellence Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers. William Jemison ‘85 was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, the only one of the 268 new fellows who is affiliated with a college rather than with a university.

Lafayette students also benefit from the growing success of our faculty in securing grants to support innovative teaching and research, including initiatives that are broadly interdisciplinary in their approach. Two grants which members of our faculty received from the National Science Foundation last year illustrate the impact of this external support. Chun Wai Liew, head of Lafayette’s Computer Science Department, and Valerie Barr, his counterpart at Union College, were awarded $1.15 million to help faculty and students in other disciplines understand and adopt computational approaches to their work. Lafayette faculty members from three different academic divisions—Christopher Ruebeck (Economics & Business), Sharon Jones (Civil & Environmental Engineering), and Jeffrey Pfaffmann (Computer Science) —were awarded a $635,000 grant through the NSF’s Human and Social Dynamics Priority Area program to examine how the life cycles of shipping pallets, cell phone batteries, and water delivery systems are affected by policy-makers’ decisions.

The important work being done by our faculty as teachers, scholars, and mentors is reinforced by strong academic leadership within the administration. During the summer Dr. Wendy Hill, a member of Lafayette’s faculty since 1989, became our new Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and Dr. Hannah Stewart-Gambino joined us from Lehigh to fill the newly created position of Dean of the College. Their efforts will be critical to our success in securing the academic resources and fulfilling the curricular initiatives outlined in the strategic plan.

The 2006-07 Summary of Giving and Volunteer Participation, which was mailed last month, celebrated a number of impressive achievements made possible by Lafayette alumni. We are immensely fortunate to be on the receiving end of such loyalty, creativity, and generosity.

The Annual Fund and the Maroon Club set giving records. The Marquis Society enrolled more members than ever, and Reunion and Homecoming attracted record numbers of alumni and guests. The number of alumni chapters nearly doubled, and we are also proud of the Alumni Association’s efforts to reach out to our international alumni.

In 2006-07, 866 alumni—a 30 percent increase over the previous year—assisted the Career Services Office by sponsoring internships and externships, participating in networking and mentoring events, launching the “Orientation to Life” program, and providing other aid and encouragement to students. Seventeen of our undergraduates who held summer internships did so with stipends funded by alumni and with additional funding provided through the Senior Class Gift, a substantial increase over the 9 stipends awarded in 2006.

In remembering the contributions of Lafayette alumni over the past year, I am saddened to reflect on the loss of two alumni who, although they graduated many decades apart, left an indelible mark. Ned Jesser ‘39 supported his college in almost every way imaginable, including an extended period of service as a trustee. Dan O’Neil ‘06, who was a victim of the tragedy at Virginia Tech last April, engaged us with his enthusiasm and delighted us with his music. Their examples will continue to inspire us.

Last May our graduating seniors and their families heard an extremely thoughtful baccalaureate sermon delivered by the Rev. Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard and the Pusey Minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church. Having read a number of our publications as he prepared for that service, Rev. Gomes commented on the frequency with which the word “excellence” appeared. “How about a little goodness thrown in,” he asked, “just to mix things up?”

His point was well taken. While this report underscores my belief that Lafayette College has an obligation to its students and alumni and to the broader community to be the best educational institution it possibly can be, the building blocks that enable us to achieve that level of excellence must themselves rest on something larger and more fundamental.

I can think of no better expression of those enduring values than that provided through the life and example of the Marquis de Lafayette. I am equally confident that we are preparing our 21st-century graduates to honor that legacy by engaging with their world as responsibly, as steadfastly, as passionately, and as energetically as he engaged with his.

Daniel H. Weiss