2016 Address to Parents of First-Year Students

There is an amazing amount of positive energy on campus today! Good afternoon. What a great day for move-in. It is my great pleasure to welcome the parents and family members of the Class of 2020 to Lehigh University. From our family to yours, welcome.

Lehigh is a special place made up of special people, and you got to meet some of them earlier today: our Lehigh Brown volunteer army of students, staff, and faculty who pitched in to help you unload your vehicles. Move-in day is one of our great Lehigh traditions, and I hope it helped your sons and daughters to feel at home. I enjoyed meeting many of you this morning on my tour of the residence halls while carrying boxes, clothing, refrigerators, and the like. I even saw a couple plastic crates with the first-year reading books Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and The Dorito Effect, so I know everyone is ready for our upcoming book discussion. I also read these books this summer and am eager to discuss them with our students.

The Lehigh Class of 2020 hails from 40 different states and 30 different countries. The Lehigh Class of 2020 is an intelligent group of young women and men: The average SAT score is 1331.

The Lehigh Class of 2020 is a multi-talented group: One student has her own style blog … another was a counselor at a fly fishing camp … we have a member of a first-place barbershop quartet (this brought back memories, as I used to sing in a barbershop quartet in high school and attended meetings of SPEBSQSA: Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America) … we have a pianist who performed on stage at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia … a synchronized gymnastics champion who earned a silver medal at the world championships. One of the members of the Class of 2020 did a summer service trip to Fiji and worked on a farm in the Nasouri Highlands. Another earned the top prize in the 2016 Mars Exploration Student Data team competition sponsored by NASA. In short, this is an amazingly talented group of young women and men. They are here because they belong here. They earned it, each and every one of them.

Today is the beginning of a tremendous journey in your child’s life, as they pass from your family to ours. I am sure you have some anxieties about that. As parents, it’s only natural. You may be wondering if your son or daughter is really ready for all this. Will they be safe here? Will they make the right social decisions? Will they do their homework? Will they eat right? As a parent of a student in the Lehigh Class of 2019, I worried about all of this a year ago. But I will say that all worked out well; and even though we’re on the same campus, I don’t see much of my son. (Maybe that’s why it worked out well?) Like all of you, I am worrying today, as I just dropped off my younger son at Colorado–Boulder to start his freshman year.

I can tell you this much with certainty: At Lehigh University, there is no greater priority than the well-being of each and every one of our students. Safety is a shared responsibility. Academic success is a shared responsibility. We will do our part.

At the same time, we need students to do their part by using good judgment and making smart decisions, particularly with regard to their social life. We have a wonderful support staff of dedicated professionals to help them, if and when they need it.

Just because your child is here and you are back home doesn’t mean you have to be in the dark. I urge you to formulate a communication plan with your student; set expectations as to how often you will talk to each other. With regard to their academic progress, your child can give you permission to access their “secure” information via the parent portal on our website; this information includes class schedules, grades, academic transcripts, and financial aid information. All they have to do is contact the Registrar’s Office. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend you discuss this with your daughter or son.    

At Lehigh, we pride ourselves on being an inclusive living and learning environment. You may have noticed on your campus visits a framed document titled, “The Principles of Our Equitable Community.” Your sons and daughters will see these Principles in their classroom buildings, residence halls, and athletic facilities. The fundamental message is this: At Lehigh, we celebrate our diversity, and we embrace our academic, cultural, economic, and physical differences. We respect one another, we look out for one another, and we help one another succeed. These Principles are not just words on paper; they are what we believe in and what we expect of our entire campus community.

We also pride ourselves on fostering student success. A successful student is an engaged student, and the opportunities for engagement here are many and varied:
We encourage academic experiences to spill out of classrooms into residence hall rooms, libraries, dinner conversations; we aspire for our students to engage in research – learning the art of discovery – with world-renowned faculty; to learn and experience new cultures through our study abroad programs; to work, to lead, and to learn from one another in our clubs and organizations; to take part in intramural and varsity sports; to experience the arts; to enjoy the local South Bethlehem community – the list goes on and on. This breadth of opportunities is the hallmark of a Lehigh education, and I will continually urge your sons and daughters to take full advantage of it.

Lastly, you should know that the Class of 2020 is part of a distinguished Lehigh family numbering well over 70,000 alumni worldwide. Our alums are fiercely loyal; they welcome and engage new students as their own. In fact, at the rally this Saturday night, your sons and daughters will be adopted by the class that graduated 50 years before the anticipated graduation date of this class: the Class of 1970. And they will have the opportunity to meet members of that class. Our alumni serve the university in extraordinary ways, and they are an invaluable resource to our students. I met an alum during move-in last August who told me that when his son graduates in 2019, his family will have received 110 years of education at Lehigh!

By the time your child leaves here, they will have received a first-rate education and forged some of the strongest relationships of their lives. It could be with their roommate, a teammate, a lab partner, a professor, a member of the support staff – or, more likely, all of the above. But these relationships will be enduring and, I guarantee you, they will be special.

So again, welcome to the Lehigh family. I hope to see many of you back on campus for Family Weekend in October, but please know that you are always welcome here. We want all of you to be as much a part of the Lehigh family as your sons and daughters. So please, don’t be strangers. Come and see us often. Thank you.

At this time, I will hand the podium over to Stefanie Burke, assistant dean and director of the First-Year Experience. Stefanie?