Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Rev. Lawrence Biondi, S.J.
President of Saint Louis University

University President Lawrence Biondi, S.J., received the 2005 Citizen of the Year Award during a special ceremony April 19. Awarded by a committee of former recipients and sponsored by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the honor is given annually to a community leader who demonstrates concern for St. Louis' growth and vitality. Last year's recipient, Dr. Donald Suggs, publisher and president of the St. Louis American, introduced Biondi and presented the award. During the ceremony, Biondi delivered a speech that referenced SLU's successes but focused more on the issues facing the St. Louis region that most concern him. Below are Biondi's remarks from the event.

Thank you, Dr. Suggs, for your kind introduction. I also would like to thank the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, especially Terry Egger, president and publisher of the Post-Dispatch, and all the previous recipients of this award for giving me this honor.

I am proud to say that much has been accomplished at Saint Louis University since I became president in 1987. And while this Citizen of the Year award bears my name, I know, and you know, that this award honors not only me but this entire university community that I am privileged to lead.

Biondi accepts the 2005 Citizen of the Year award from Dr. Donald Suggs of the St. Louis American.

As president, I make many decisions - but I cannot and do not implement them all. My strong executive team of the President's Coordinating Council, our faculty, staff and students - from the grounds crew to the history professors to the health care providers to the deans and vice presidents, and many, many other professionals - are the ones who make this University shine. I thank each and every one of them, along with our trustees, alumni and benefactors for making Saint Louis University a truly outstanding Jesuit university.

Saint Louis University has grown dramatically during the past decade. I take pride in the fact that SLU is recognized as one of the country's most beautiful urban campuses. But our growth continues in many areas of Midtown St. Louis. At Grand and Chouteau our new $80-million biomedical research building is under construction. And by this summer we will break ground and begin to construct a $77-million multipurpose arena at Compton and Laclede. Our national reputation continues to grow as well. We are recognized as one of the top five Catholic universities in the country. We have a number of programs ranked among the best in America, including our health law program that is ranked, again this year, as the best in the nation. Our $821 million endowment is third among all 234 Catholic universities in the United States. Our freshman applications for the coming academic year are 50 percent higher than last year's.

But there is something else that makes this institution so special. To understand how special, one needs to go to the heart of what we believe SLU to be as a Jesuit university. There are many wonderful colleges and universities where young women and men can receive a quality education. But at SLU, our Jesuit tradition of education, health care, social justice and humanistic learning guides everything we do every day. It is not just what is taught in the classroom, it is also what is caught in our SLU environment - and that knowledge is then shared with and given back to others. Last year our faculty, staff and students volunteered nearly 760,000 hours to almost 1,300 organizations and events in our greater St. Louis metropolitan community. For example, this past Thanksgiving, a busload of our students gave up their holiday with their families to travel to New Orleans to spend the weekend cleaning up and handing out supplies to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Every year, our law and medical students provide free services to hundreds of our low-income citizens in our legal and medical clinics in St. Louis.

We do these things and more because we believe in social justice, not simply as a theoretical concept, but because we see some specific social justice issues challenging all of us in our community. At SLU, we believe in welcoming everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs, race, or sexual orientation. We believe that a homeless person walking on any of our city and county streets is just as valued as a CEO of any of our RCGA companies. On our campus, we encourage competing ideas and ideologies. We cannot challenge social justice issues off campus, if we are not living and practicing our belief in social justice within our own campus boundaries. Sometimes that means hosting speakers, events or plays that some may find inappropriate on a Catholic college campus. But as soon as censorship begins at any university, where does censorship then end?

We also believe in caring for our neighbors and our community. God has created all of us - straight and gay, persons of color, persons of different socio-economic backgrounds, persons from varied cultural, religious or geographical origins. We at SLU reach out to all, regardless of their circumstances, to enrich our society and, indeed, to enrich our own lives. For example, SLU has established a revolving loan fund to help businesses and other institutions in the development of our Midtown neighborhood area. We also offer forgivable loans to our faculty and staff who want to move into neighborhoods around our University. We give school supplies to the children who cannot afford them, and our law students helped get some Medicaid benefits reinstated for hundreds of lower-income Missourians. We believe in teaching our students to be servant-leaders and to strive to make our world a more civilized environment in which to live and to work. And in following these beliefs, we at SLU sometimes have to stand up and take a position that some may see as controversial. As president, I see this as following our civic and moral responsibility.

And since I have been given this platform, and since I have the attention of so many prominent St. Louisans - at least for an hour - I want to speak about a number of issues that concern me about our city and our region. A city and region I have come to love and appreciate over the years, but also a city and region that seem too often to be at odds, rather than working together to achieve a set of determined common goals. I believe that being named Citizen of the Year brings with it a responsibility, first to discern and then to help lead the dialogue of how we all can make our lives better, and at the same time, to point out the significant challenges we have to deal with in order to achieve a more equitable, a more fulfilling life for all of our citizens.
As president of this university, I have had the opportunity to see firsthand what works and what does not work in St. Louis. What concerns me most is what I see as a lack of a coordinated vision for our entire metropolitan area. It is not that people do not care - they do. It is that they very seldom work together toward a common vision for our region. I would suggest that we think of a coordinated, effective leadership model that reflects the required interdependency like a "three-legged stool." The three legs of the stool being government, business and higher education.

By government, I mean aldermen, mayors, county executives, state senators and representatives as well as other civic decision-makers. By business, I mean not only member companies of our Civic Progress, Regional Chamber and Growth Association and Regional Business Council, but other businesses - big and small. By higher education I mean our universities, colleges and community colleges.

How often can we honestly say that all three represented legs work together cooperatively and effectively for the benefit of our metropolitan region? I do not see it very often. In my opinion it is one of the key reasons why the St. Louis area continues to suffer from an inferiority complex - a feeling that we are just never going to be as great as we think we could be - or as great as we all know we should be.

A few years ago, I traveled with the RCGA to Seattle and Denver to see what those cities were doing right. We witnessed that their "three-legged stool" was supporting a real renaissance in each of those cities. Their leaders of government, higher education and business were working together effectively and efficiently. We learned that they developed common goals and committed to sharing resources to achieve those goals. We learned that it takes a team of invested citizens, who put politics and personal and institutional histories aside and concentrate on fostering necessary changes not only for their survival but also for their community's growth and development.

Here at home, what are some of the challenges that our universities, civic governments and businesses should face squarely and work together to find solutions?

First, it is often convenient to say the city and county are too different from each other - that there are just too many municipalities with too many different priorities to get everyone on the same page. And so we meander along - with successes here and there - but with an equal or greater number of failures - failures that might not have happened if we had all joined together with an agenda for the common good of our region. For example, we watch major retailers move their stores from area to area, in search of better tax credits, leaving abandoned buildings and diminished neighborhoods in their wake. Why can't the successful model of the Zoo-Museum Tax District - where city and county citizens together support our major cultural institutions - be applied elsewhere in our region? City and county leaders in government, business and higher education must work collaboratively to devise plans that help their municipalities without hurting others.

Think back to the flooded New Orleans of last September and how the lack of coordination almost doomed that city. In the face of a similar disaster, would we as a region fare any better? What if our region suffered a biological terrorist attack or any number of natural disasters? Is our city-county partnership strong enough to take care of our citizens' most basic needs? We must be ready to help ourselves. We need to tap into our existing resources - such as Saint Louis University's own Center for Bioterrorism - to help the entire metropolitan area prepare for disaster.

Second, I wonder how many people in this room have children in St. Louis City Public Schools. My guess is, not very many. For too many years we have allowed our city public elementary and secondary schools to continue to fail. We must get everyone to understand that if our public schools fail, our community fails. And our schools affect everything - from property values to economic development to future community-wide leaders. We cannot let city borders determine our interests and investments in the education of our young people. We can no longer justify our lack of involvement with the excuse that it is a "city problem." Saint Louis University has a long-standing partnership with our neighboring Wyman Elementary School, with our students regularly offering tutoring, mentoring and other help. SLU and the region's other colleges and universities must do more to share the talents and expertise of our faculties, staff and students with the city public schools. How can the business community help our local public schools? Adopt-a-school programs? The three legs of the stool - government, business and higher education - must come together to take region-wide ownership of the problems with area schools and find real, workable solutions. If we succeed, then the entire region benefits.

Tackling that problem would be a good start, but it is not the only challenge.

Third, what can government, higher education and business leaders do to develop a better mass transit system for our region? Many of us continue to panic about the coming Highway 40 construction project. Why? Because for many commuters, there is no reliable alternative for transportation to and from work and school. And as a result, we are going to suffer through years of traffic nightmares that will affect every business and institution all along Highway 40. Despite region-wide discussion about how to improve the area's mass transit system, there is still no better alternative than driving our cars. At SLU we have excellent urban planners in our College of Public Service who are already working with many of our local communities, but who, along with others, can share their expertise in planning for our region's future mass transit system.

Fourth, our region faces another transportation challenge. With the demise of TWA, the lack of direct flights in to and out of Lambert Airport not only annoys our residents, travelers and visitors, but it also has a direct impact on our status as a world-class city. How are we as a region working to attract more flights to Lambert? We have a new billion-dollar runway expansion, yet a recent Post-Dispatch story headlined it as a "runway to nowhere." A vital airport is essential to the region's continuing socio-economic growth, but how can more of us come to the table to help make sure Lambert International Airport succeeds? Here at SLU, our Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology is becoming a major global flight safety research center. We are also training the men and women who may become the next generation of airline pilots and aerospace engineers. What synergies between Parks College and Lambert Airport could benefit both institutions and our entire region?

Fifth, a great region is enhanced by a forward-thinking civic government, cutting-edge teaching and research universities and by innovative, risk-taking businesses. Over the last decade we have seen far too many quality corporate citizens move to other cities. As a region and a state, what should we be doing to make our community more attractive for businesses? We need to honestly look at all of the barriers we have established that keep corporations from locating or staying here. Are the taxes effective? Does our city's earnings tax help or hinder businesses? Are they obstructing the significant interest of potential business leaders? All of us - government, business and higher education leaders - must work together to find effective solutions; not expensive marketing slogans and costly survey predictors of our community's successes or failures. There has to be an integrated, coordinated strategic plan, from the three-legged stool perspective, for all these issues so that we can all buy into their solutions, so that we can all support them. The old political and geographic divisions have got to end. We as a region must realize that we all rise or fall together. The time has come for all of us to work together without worrying about who gets the credit for our small business successes.

Sixth, to grow and succeed as a region, we must also understand that we will thrive from being diverse. I take great pride in the diversity we have in our university - and we are always striving for even more diversity. But there remains polarization that must be addressed. There are few truly integrated neighborhoods in our region. We also need to integrate our workforce. At SLU, we are committed to minority inclusion. On our Research Building project, we are currently exceeding our institutional goals of having 25 percent of the work go to minority-owned businesses and 5 percent go to women-owned businesses. However, that is not enough. The workforce on any construction project in our region is not representative of the citizens in our region, and more needs to be done. We have to find ways to get more minorities and women trained and certified to work on construction projects in our region. This will require leadership from all three legs of the stool coming together to address this critical economic and social justice issue.

And while I am talking about inclusion, what about those who have emigrated here from other countries to try and improve their lives? Rather than see them - as some do - as a threat to our country and our region, why are we not reaching out to them and seeing how they can enrich both our culture and theirs?

Seventh, there is also the challenge of political polarization. I do not think it has ever been worse than it is now. When did it become commonplace to verbally attack those who do not agree with us? I have always believed that no political party, group or organization has a monopoly on good ideas. Yet we are so locked into what we believe, so convinced that we are right, that it often paralyzes opportunities for collaboration and growth. We have very fine public servants of both parties at the local, state and national level; yet we tend to spend so much more time discussing their differences than their common ground. The future success of our St. Louis region is not a Republican versus Democrat thing; it is not a city versus county thing; it is not a black versus white thing. It is an us thing. All of us. - you and me - together.

In the end, solving any or all of these challenging problems will take open-mindedness, cooperation, commitment and responsibility. How often do we stubbornly cling to our affiliations and fiefdoms, refusing to collaborate, even when it would best benefit the greater part of our community?

My first grade teacher flunked me. She explained to my mother that I had to learn to speak and understand English since I was raised in an Italian-speaking home environment. She also accused me of being a distracted first-grader - even a dreamer. Sometimes people do not change, do they?

Let me share my dreams for our great city that I love dearly. I dream of a lively riverfront with a beautiful marina like the one in Baltimore. I challenge the three-legged-stool leaders to think creatively and imaginatively about a St. Louis marina - that would connect to the Chouteau's Greenway, stimulating both recreational opportunities and economic development. I would like to see the boom on Washington Avenue extend beyond that one street. I would like to go downtown on a Sunday afternoon and see people shopping, dining and enjoying themselves. A great city must have a great downtown. I would like to see St. Louis become one of our country's hubs for biotechnology. To accomplish that we must provide a welcoming environment for research companies, or they will go elsewhere.

Most of all I would like to see the day when we are no longer divided by whether we live in the city or the county or in the Metro East. That we are all simply St. Louisans. That we have common goals and a practical, strategic plan for achieving these goals, and that we are all on board. Not blindly, not without challenging ourselves and one another, but with a determination to make our region a place where everyone wants to live, work and raise their families.

I am 67 years old, and you may be thinking how can Larry Biondi possibly believe these challenges will be faced squarely and solved effectively in his remaining years at SLU. I would remind you that my mother - who is here today sitting in the first row - is 98, and my father also lived to the age of 98. So, ladies and gentlemen, I have very good genes, and I plan to be here stirring things up in St. Louis for a very, very long time.

Everyone wants to be a part of a winning organization. And that is why, despite our region's challenges, I do have great hope for St. Louis. That winning momentum is underway here. Downtown is more vibrant than ever - and becoming even more residential. A new baseball stadium is bringing thousands to our city for every Cardinals game - and maybe those fans will stick around for dinner or visit one of our city's many museums. Within the next few months, our new multipurpose SLU Arena will begin construction on the eastern end of our Midtown campus. The Cortex plan for a science and technology corridor is promising - and could be a boon to the whole region. The bio-technology synergies among the Missouri Botanical Garden, Washington University, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Saint Louis University are all good signs leading to greater cooperation in a number of partner research projects.

But hope alone will not take this city to the next level. Hope and promise, as wonderful as they are, are only half of the equation. We must also commit ourselves to St. Louis. We must commit our time. We must commit our money. We must commit our talents. And, most importantly, we must commit ourselves to working together. Too often we seem to focus only on our little piece of the puzzle, not realizing that a success across town is just as good for all of us. I firmly believe that it is this myopic attitude that is holding St. Louis back.

So I challenge all of us here today to come together to articulate a coordinated vision for the St. Louis region - not just our city - but also for the greater metropolitan region, both sides of the river. Let us decide what we want to be and then work to get there. I am not talking about Blue Ribbon committees that issue hundred-page reports that are filed away and collect good Midwestern dust. I am talking about the leaders of this region - from government, business and higher education - taking the reins and deciding how best to set definite goals and then to find the appropriate methods for implementing these goals. But first we must also agree that we will all benefit from - and be proud of - each others' successes.

It is risky. We might just have to support some ideas or plans that do not benefit us directly. But we also might find we are more alike than different, and from that reality, our region might just grow and even blossom.

When I look at previous recipients of this award, I see plenty of risk-takers, men and women who had a particular vision for their institution and saw it through. Blessed with so much talent, how could we not all succeed in working together for the common good of our fellow citizens?

There is a story I heard recently about John F. Kennedy and his challenge to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. One day, Kennedy was taking a tour of NASA, and at one point he met a cleaning woman. Kennedy asked her, "What is your job here?" The woman responded, "I'm helping to put a man on the moon."

Ladies and gentlemen, the time is now to decide our futures - the future of St. Louis and the St. Louis region. It is time to take action. Like the NASA cleaning woman, each one of us has a part to play. We must count on one another!

I would like to again thank the committee and all of you who are here today. You honor me with your presence. You would honor me even more if, in the days ahead, you would join with me in making a concerted effort to move St. Louis - all of St. Louis - to new heights. Thank you.

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