The inauguration ceremony for Northeastern’s seventh president, Joseph E. Aoun, commemorated the arrival of a new leader for an institution on the move.
At Matthews Arena, prominent voices in higher education spoke of the myriad contributions of colleges and universities to the success of individual students, the nation, and the world beyond. Northeastern has helped—and will continue to help—elevate that success, they said.
Carol Glod, chair of Northeastern’s Faculty Senate Agenda Committee, commended “the transformative power of education at Northeastern University.”
Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, called America’s colleges and universities “the mainstay of our nation’s progress.” He praised Northeastern’s “diversity, innovation, and excellence” and Aoun’s wisdom, grace, and culture.
Steven Sample, president of the University of Southern California, lauded Aoun for his twenty-plus years of service at USC, praising his scholarship as well as his leadership. “Remember,” Sample told the audience, “that you are stewards of an institution that will be here for hundreds of thousands of students yet unborn.”
When Aoun took the podium, he paid tribute to Northeastern’s transformation from a commuter school for working-class people into a world-class research university.
He is “thankful,” he said, “for the opportunity to serve an institution that has a unique place in higher education, a place that this university has carved out for itself, not by following others but by charting its own path to excellence.”
Remarks by Carol A. Glod
Carol A. Glod | Chair, Faculty Senate Agenda
It is a pleasure to be here today to represent over eight hundred full-time faculty and deliver remarks on their behalf and the Senate leadership, the Faculty Senate Agenda Committee (Professors [Sharon] Bruns, [James] Fox, [Stephen] McKnight, [Stuart] Peterfreund, and [Tracy] Robinson-Wood).
Today’s ceremony began with Professor [Joshua] Jacobson leading the Northeastern Choral Society singing “Domine Salvum Fac.” Loosely translated, the words say, “Lord, vouchsafe our president. And hear us on the day when we call upon you.”
I know you hear us when we ask you to lead us successfully into the next important chapter in the history of Northeastern. Today, we celebrate the successes that brought you to us and those that the university has achieved, and mark this day in history as we join together to move the university forward.
We’ve already seen that you have emphasized the academic mission of the university and begun several important initiatives, including the development of the Academic Planning Initiative. Together, we have begun to confront a balanced, thoughtful, and informed analysis, characteristic of the academy, to develop our strategic plan for the future.
You have built upon the existing Academic Investment Plan to substantially increase full-time faculty by widely promoting the Interdisciplinary Faculty Initiative. While other universities confront how to lower departmental barriers and initiate collaborations across various silos, I believe that NU is a place that is not only open to but has embraced interdisciplinary collaborations—in teaching, research, and service. This collaborative philosophy crosses disciplines and colleges, and unites us with our community partners.
You have also asked us to celebrate the success of the faculty, and challenged us to overcome some of our own perceptions, instead emphasizing and building upon our existing strengths. Tomorrow, we will celebrate and begin the Life of the Mind series, a lecture series that highlights some of the important interdisciplinary work of several of our faculty: Professors [Jessica] Blom-Hoffman, [Richard] Daynard, and [Alexandros] Makriyannis. On Wednesday, our students and faculty will join to present their work in the Research Expo. Thursday, we will celebrate and honor the achievement of one of our faculty, Professor [Sanjeev] Mukerjee, with the Klein Lecture.
You emphasize excellence. Faculty excellence is key to institutional excellence. A strong faculty is and will be the way to develop strength in academic excellence and enhanced reputation. Together, we will use the talent of our faculty to further our long-term commitment to the welfare of our students and the society they serve.
While other colleges and universities struggle with whether to develop a core curriculum and what that would look like, the faculty have initiated and developed a General Education curriculum along with our deans and student colleagues. You have heard us, supported and joined with us to begin to implement this important curriculum with our undergraduate students.
Shortly, we’ll hear an original composition, “Reflections on Northeastern Illuminated.” This piece, composed by Professor [Emmett] Price and performed by Northeastern faculty and a student, not only honors and celebrates the inauguration of our seventh president, but illuminates, commemorates, and celebrates the entire university.
As we highlight the achievements of the university, together we also face several challenges. One challenge is to sustain the important gains we have made to date, and expand and build upon them. As a nurse, as the first and only person in my family to receive the PhD, and as a descendant of immigrant Polish grandparents who spoke little to no English, I know the value, power, and importance of education. I believe that one part of the transformative power of education at NU is the true difference an education here makes in the lives of our students and continues to make in the lives of our alumni.
Together, we’ll wrestle with important questions about the specific directions that emanate from the Academic Strategic Plan. Together, we’ll look to the future to position the university to meet these and other challenges, enhance our reputation, and prepare our students to be engaged citizens who actively contribute to the world.
As we write the next chapter, our challenge is to create a lasting legacy based on the scope and scale of our aspirations until we find the answers that give meaning to our actions and lives. How our dreams will come true and our hopes will be fulfilled will be based on a shared vision with you, along with the students, staff, alumni, trustees, and our partners in the community.
One of the last musical selections is the Choral Society’s rendition of the last part of a concert piece by Haydn. Called the “Agnus Dei” movement, it represents a personal address leading to its famous last words, “dona nobis pacem”—“grant us peace.” One interpretation of this finale is “transport us to a great and certain joy.”
I, on behalf of the faculty, congratulate and honor you on your inauguration, on your commitment to distinctiveness, excellence, and interdisciplinary partnerships at Northeastern University and with our community partners.
I know you have heard us on this day when we call upon you to lead, inspire, and join together to shape our future to a great and certain joy.
Remarks by Vartan Gregorian
Vartan Gregorian | President, Carnegie Corporation of New York
Mayor Menino; Mrs. Menino; Neal Finnegan, chairman of the Board of Trustees of Northeastern University; distinguished faculty; trustees; staff; students; alumni, alumnae of the university; my dear friend President Steven Sample; delegates of institutions of higher education; members of our family; ladies and gentlemen: Good morning.
It’s a great honor and privilege for me to bring greetings and congratulations on behalf of the delegates of learned societies and associations. I rise to pay tribute to Dr. Joseph Aoun, Northeastern’s seventh president. He’s an outstanding and visionary leader, and I congratulate the university for its choice.
Today is a day of celebration. We celebrate United States higher education. We celebrate the democratization of access to higher education and equal opportunity. We celebrate excellence and diversity. We celebrate innovation and leadership. We celebrate Northeastern University. We celebrate the United States as a land of opportunity. And we celebrate Dr. Aoun’s ancestral land of Lebanon, a tragic country now, with a rich historical legacy that has given us, or nowadays we use the euphemism “outsourced” to us, many talented individuals—to the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia—including Dr. Aoun to Northeastern.
For more than two centuries, America’s colleges and universities have been the mainstay of our nation’s progress, helping it become an economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and political power. The American university is incomparably the most democratic in the world. It is popular in the best sense of the term at meeting and educating unprecedented numbers of men and women of every race and social class. Students from every imaginable background have found a place in our nation’s variety of colleges and universities, public or private, large or small, secular or sectarian.
Today, there are almost 4,200 colleges and universities in our country, including some 1,700 public and private two-year institutions. Evidence of the growing centrality of higher education can be illustrated by a few startling statistics, I hope. In the twentieth century, total enrollment in institutions of higher education grew from just 4 percent of the college-age population in 1900 to more than 65 percent in the 1990s. And within two years of high school graduation, three out of four students go on for some form of higher education.
By the end of the twentieth century, higher education employed more than 2.8 million people, including 590,000 full-time faculty members in what amounted to a $100 billion business. More people work for higher education than automobile, steel, textile, and other industries, or whatever is left of them. Until recently, the unparalleled capacity of higher-education institutions in the United States to carry out basic research has put us at the cutting edge of science and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Without these institutions of higher education, I believe the United States would never have achieved this current overall prominence.
Diversity constitutes one of the major strengths of our higher-education system. Market discipline, interspersed with governmental effort, has contributed to the comparative openness and flexibility of American institutions as a condition of survival in the public as well as private sectors. Let us also not forget the fact that American higher education owes its success to the fact that our institutions of higher education operate in traditions of freedom, autonomy, and openness. Traditionally, individual institutions have emphasized different functions and have complemented each other by meeting different local, regional, national, and international needs and challenges.
Because America’s higher education has the capacity to be in tune with and adjust to societal needs, it has responded to changing times, dispensing knowledge, training, and even life skills that have provided graduates with the tools to, in essence, create our nation’s future. Diversity, innovation, and excellence are powerful ingredients, the dynamos of our higher-education system. Case in point is Northeastern University. Its history is marked with the imaginative national and international initiatives, by the realization that, in this age of specialization, knowledge cannot remain compartmentalized; that knowledge, education, and scholarship transcend all borders, all frontiers; that innovation and cooperation are essential tools for scientific, organizational, and institutional success.
That is why Northeastern has some twenty-eight interdisciplinary research centers. A center for subsurface sensing and imaging systems. A center for high-rate nanomanufacturing. A center for advanced microgravity materials processing. As a result, every year some thirty new technologies and inventions are created at Northeastern alone. While Northeastern has [six] colleges, including arts and sciences, health sciences, . . . engineering, business, computer and information sciences, what is impressive, in my opinion, is the fact that, since 1909, it also has become our country’s foremost, unique—I should say, a much-abused word—and unchallenged leader in cooperative education.
The university’s division of cooperative education has become a destination of choice for those seeking practice-oriented education and career development. Philosopher John Dewey, the author of Democracy and Education, published in 1916, would have been enchanted if he were here today to see the success of Northeastern. Because Northeastern does everything he preached. It emphasizes experience, experiment, and purposeful learning.
It’s amazing that this university is able to place some five thousand students each year with more than two thousand co-op employers in Boston and the United States alone. Its ability to recruit students from some 120 countries for its co-op program—this is an astonishing phenomenon.
Naturally, the success of Northeastern University is due to its faculty, to its dedicated staff, the board of governors, but above all else the conductor of your symphony, namely, the president of the university. In choosing Joseph Aoun, Northeastern University has now a new dynamic leader who will continue to institutionalize the past and current gains of the university and inaugurate a new chapter of outstanding accomplishments.
I congratulate him for coming from California to the Northeast. For bringing wisdom, bringing grace, bringing culture, not only from California but also from Lebanon. Not only from American education but from the French education system as well.
And I wish him good luck. It’s a very hard position to be president of a university nowadays. Anybody who succeeds should be cherished, after examining his mental health.
And then he should receive all your cooperation and love because, as Martin Luther King says, we may have come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now, together. And you are in the same boat with him. So help him to make Northeastern great. Thank you very much.
Remarks by Steven B. Sample
Steven B. Sample | President, University of Southern California
What a great day this is for Northeastern University. It’s my pleasure and privilege to be here on this special day, not only as a university president, but also as a Northeastern alumnus by virtue of an honorary doctorate that you were kind enough to confer on me in 2004.
I’m honored to be here to celebrate the inauguration of an outstanding colleague, a renowned scholar, and an energetic and inspiring leader, the seventh president of Northeastern University—Dr. Joseph Aoun.
We at USC are very grateful for Joseph’s service over the past quarter century, and I’m personally very proud of his many accomplishments. Joseph came to USC in 1982 as a member of our faculty. We were fortunate, indeed, to recruit a linguistics scholar of his stature and pedigree. For the next two decades, he succeeded and excelled. He devoted himself to scholarly work and teaching, and published books and papers that were lauded as seminal works in his field. In the process, he earned the respect of his students and colleagues, and the admiration of his peers around the country.
But, of more significance to us today, during Joseph’s twenty years as a full-time faculty member, he realized that he had the ability and the drive to lead.
He took the helm as dean of the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, the very heart of the university. Once again, Joseph excelled, and this time with the able and enthusiastic help of his wife, Zeina.
As dean, he understood the aspirations of his faculty and students, and encouraged them to pursue their greatest ambitions. He listened carefully to his colleagues, and helped them create, collaborate, and innovate. His energy and optimism attracted more of the world’s best faculty and inspired them with a vision, not only of what USC College was but also of what it could and should become. He identified generous philanthropists, helped them find programs at USC that they were passionate about, and assisted them in Somehow, while discharging his many administrative duties, he also found time to enhance his reputation as a scholar. The quagmire of minutiae can be insidious for the leader of any organization. I’ve seen many a bright-eyed senior university administrator slip inexorably into the roiling waves of the ephemeral—and thereby lose the vision, the fire, and even the intellectual appetite that initially attracted them to academic leadership. But not Joseph. He kept his eyes on the future while embracing the present. He kept pace with his contemporaries. He continued to publish. He was rumored to have carried not one but two BlackBerrys.
Today, his years of perseverance have paid off. Now he has reached the lofty heights of the presidency of a major university.
Over nearly three decades as a university president, I’ve learned a few things about leading an institution of higher education. A president must play many roles and wear many hats. It’s been said that a university president is a boss and a broker, a catalyst and a compromiser, a counselor and a crisis manager, a gambler and a caretaker, an elected leader and an autocrat, a quarterback and a cheerleader. Joseph, you might consider getting a third BlackBerry.
Although the demands of being president can be daunting, leading a university can also be immensely rewarding and fulfilling. There are, of course, the rewards of accomplishment and achievement, of dreaming big dreams and making them come true. But leading a university can provide even greater satisfaction. A university is far more than a collection of libraries and laboratories, a gathering place for faculty and students. A university is a family, a community, a collection of values and ideals that will outlast all of us here today.
The eminent university president Clark Kerr made the following observation about the hardiness of universities. Kerr said, “About eighty-five institutions in the Western world that were established prior to 1520 still exist in recognizable form, with similar functions and with unbroken histories, including the Catholic Church; the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain; several Swiss cantons; and seventy universities. Autocratic kings, feudal lords with their vassals, and guilds with their monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways.”
Like Mr. Kerr, I believe that universities endure because our values prevail and our missions live on. Today at Northeastern, you have a wonderful opportunity to nurture the values that will help this university live on for centuries in the lives of its students, faculty, and alumni. To become an enduring institution, make sure you set your sights on lofty goals. It’s up to you to sense where this university’s opportunities lie, and to aggressively pursue those opportunities.
You can attract to Northeastern more of the top students from around the nation. You can retain the outstanding faculty you have, and recruit more of the leading faculty from around the world. You can enhance your ties to your alumni, and to the culturally rich and vibrant Boston community.
I enjoin all of you here at Northeastern—not only Joseph and Zeina, but all of you—to remember that you are stewards of an institution that will be here for hundreds of thousands of students yet unborn. Yours is a calling—not a task, but a calling—and a noble calling at that.
I pray God’s blessing on Joseph and Zeina, and on the entire Northeastern family, as together you take this university to new and greater heights of achievement.
President Joseph E. Aoun’s Inaugural Address
Thank you, Chairman Finnegan.
Thank you to the esteemed platform guests for your warm greetings and remarks. I am very appreciative of your participation in this event.
Thank you to all the members of Northeastern’s governing bodies, alumni, students, faculty colleagues, members of our administration and staff, friends of the university, and the many delegates from other institutions who have joined us here today.
I am honored by your presence.
I share this honor—as I have everything in my life for the past twenty-eight years—with my wife and partner, Zeina.
She is tremendously excited about our joining Northeastern, and many of you have already seen evidence of her engagement.
I am also delighted that our sons are with us today. I very rarely get them together in a listening mode, and I am going to take advantage of it.
On behalf of my family, I express my sincere thanks to the entire Northeastern community, to the friends who traveled here to be with us, and to the city of Boston.
We have met many of you in our short time here, and the warmth you have shown us has made this transition a wonderful experience. We’ve been touched by your kindness.
I stand before you today humbled by the confidence that our Board of Trustees has placed in me, and thankful for the opportunity to serve an institution that has a unique place in higher education, a place that this university has carved out for itself, not by following others but by charting its own path to excellence.
Northeastern has sprung from modest roots.
The university was founded on the upper floors of a Boston YMCA. It was a school where working men—and they were all men in 1898—attended classes at night.
Over the generations, Northeastern evolved to a commuter school, drawing primarily day students, most of them from the working-class neighborhoods in and around Boston.
The beautiful residential campus that you see today is emblematic of our remarkable transformation. Equally important is the fact that Northeastern has transformed itself into a world-class research university.
It is a university educating accomplished and sought-after students, a university engaged in research that addresses societal needs locally, nationally, and internationally.
It is a university that is committed to attracting students from Boston’s neighborhoods, and from across the country and around the world. Earlier in the program, Jean Tempel recognized two men who have played monumental roles in our history: my immediate predecessors, Jack Curry and Richard Freeland. I would add a third, Kenneth Ryder.
I owe them—as well as the other presidents of Northeastern—a tremendous debt of gratitude. They have made my job easier and more difficult at the same time.
It is not possible to fully capture the essence of an institution as diverse and complex as ours in a single speech. To do so would take a long while, and Mayor Menino offered me some sage advice about keeping my speech under four hours.
With that in mind, I will focus my remarks on four distinctive themes that characterize us. They are experiential education, translational and interdisciplinary research, humanities and the arts, and our urban engagement.
There is a common thread that runs through these four themes: the importance of building strong partnerships. There may have been a time when universities could survive and thrive in isolation. That is no longer the case.
Throughout my remarks, I will refer to our current and future partnerships, and how they allow us to better serve our students, our city, our nation, and the world.
As educators, our mission is to prepare students for a fulfilled life: intellectually, personally, and professionally.
They will know a world characterized by global competition, technological innovation, and ever more rapid transformation, a world in which they will pursue two, three, even four different careers.
We must instill in them a lifelong passion for learning, a commitment to civic engagement, an entrepreneurial spirit, and an ability to adapt and thrive amid constant change.
Our university does this in a unique way: We combine study and practice in the belief that they enlighten one another. We call this experiential education, and, as you heard Dr. Gregorian say earlier, we are the acknowledged leader.
Experiential education includes cooperative education, a model that provides students with paid internships related to their field of study.
Cooperative education, or co-op, is not easy to replicate. It requires nurturing relationships with thousands of partners. It demands flexibility in scheduling and in the curriculum. It calls for systems and people to support students scattered across the globe.
This program began in 1909 as a necessity to help students pay their tuition and has evolved into a powerful educational philosophy that distinguishes us and informs all that we do.
Our model is a strong statement about learning and cognition: In order to learn, we need to integrate study and practice. Our institutional imperative is to continue evolving cooperative education.
Furthering the integration of classroom and real-world learning is one of the crucial connections that make co-op a transformational experience. Students tell me that co-op is not about getting jobs while they are in college. It is about gaining knowledge and insight.
Globalization is breaking down the barriers of time and distance. Our students should be as comfortable in Shanghai, Johannesburg, or Mexico City as they are here in Boston.
By September of 2007, we will double the number of international co-op opportunities. Going forward, we will continue to expand the reach and scope of international co-op until our students can be found in all corners of the world.
The integration of study and practice makes students active and engaged learners and should lead us to rethink our entire undergraduate curriculum. Whether they engage in co-op or other aspects of experiential learning such as community service, team learning, or undergraduate research, students should take responsibility for their own learning experience. In this enterprise, faculty and students unite as one learning community.
Our new universal core curriculum will establish an experiential-learning requirement and will include a comparative understanding of world cultures and religions. It will prepare our students to create their own intellectual adventure, exploring different fields and combining academic majors and minors in new ways.
To guide our progress, a newly formed Center for Experiential Education will provide the higher-education community with the theoretical underpinnings of this learning model and will reaffirm it as our standard.
The second theme I will address is translational and interdisciplinary research.
I am astounded by the scholarship that is taking place in my new institution: in nanotechnology and nanomedicine, in drug discovery and drug delivery, in subsurface sensing and imaging, in urban planning and public policy, and in humanities and the arts.
People today have greater expectations for the impact research will have on their lives. We have a tremendous opportunity to achieve greater prominence by leading the integration of two movements that are reshaping the research enterprise: translational research and interdisciplinary scholarship.
The translational movement is about the integration of basic and applied research.
It shapes how effectively we move new knowledge, ideas, and discoveries to the point where they can impact societal needs. The stakes are high. Translational research will drive how competitive our city, our region, and our nation will be in the decades ahead.
This university’s grounding in the real world moved us onto the translational path.
The second movement, interdisciplinary scholarship, is driven by the fact that most societal problems are too complex to be solved by a single discipline. Environmental sustainability is one example. Public health is another.
Groundbreaking knowledge is surfacing at the intersection of academic disciplines. This is the essence of interdisciplinary scholarship.
Our entrepreneurial culture has guided us down this path, and collaboration cannot be limited to the confines of our campus. In our endeavor to integrate the translational and interdisciplinary movements, we will strive for preeminence in distinctive research platforms that build on our strengths.
We will reward innovation and collaboration. The centers of excellence that emerge from these platforms will lead us to rethink graduate education along interdisciplinary lines.
The first step in this process is our plan to hire thirty interdisciplinary faculty leaders over the next three years. They will join the vanguard of other faculty colleagues who are advancing our efforts in these areas.
Northeastern should become the destination for scholars who collaborate to advance knowledge and deliver solutions that meet societal needs.
The third theme is humanities and the arts.
We have notable strength in fields ranging from music to visual arts, from architecture to American literature, and from history to sign language.
We will build on this.
Humanities and the arts nurture an appreciation for creativity, aesthetics, and values.
For individuals, they stir our passion, motivate and ground us. For communities, they represent a universal language with the power to transcend barriers and bridge the gaps that divide.
Nowhere is this power more evident than in our Dialogue of Civilizations program, which takes our students around the world to engage with their peers.
It is my desire that, in their intellectual adventure, every Northeastern student will explore the human experience through the humanities and the arts. The reach of these fields invigorates our relationship with the community and the city.
We join with our neighbors to create film festivals and jazz concerts, to assemble an oral history of Roxbury, and to create and display art in our communities. With the Boston Symphony Orchestra, we launched an acclaimed online music conservatory.
This coming fall, we will offer bachelor and master of fine arts degrees with the Museum of Fine Arts.
There will be many other such partnerships to come.
The fourth and final theme I will speak about today is our urban engagement.
This engagement involves much more than location. It defines us. We do not consider the city and the communities around us as a research lab. Our neighbors are partners with whom we forge a common destiny.
Partnership, by definition, is a two-way street. It involves listening and learning from one another.
Let me share with you a humbling moment I experienced early on in a meeting with community leaders. While discussing workforce development, I stated that Northeastern will do more to find employment opportunities for people in the neighborhoods.
Much to my surprise, I was told, “We don’t want you to see us as needing jobs. We want you to look at us as budding entrepreneurs and help us in this endeavor.” I was taken aback. This one statement expanded my perspective.
Some people have asked me if our rise as a national and international institution has come at the expense of our engagement with the city and the communities. To the contrary: Because Boston is a world-class city, our urban engagement takes on a global significance.
Stony Brook is an ancient waterway that, to this day, flows underground, winding through the neighborhoods that intersect our campus. At one time, it united and brought sustenance to the people on its banks.
Under the aegis of Mayor Menino, we will work with community leaders to launch the Stony Brook Initiative.
Like the brook itself, this initiative will unite Northeastern and the communities in new ways. Together, we will tackle important issues that impact our neighborhoods, such as housing and economic development, K–12 education, and health and recreation.
Based on conversations with community leaders, we envision a new Northeastern-neighborhood alliance of students, faculty, and staff volunteers who will engage with the schools, homeless shelters, religious organizations, and community centers.
In the decades ahead, our graduates will be successful not only because of what they have learned at Northeastern, but also because of what they have learned here in Roxbury and Mission Hill, in the Fenway and the South End, and throughout Boston.
Zeina and I are here today because we saw something remarkable at Northeastern. I can sum it up in one word: passion.
From my first meeting with a broad cross-section of our campus community, I sensed the passion faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends feel for this wonderful institution.
Every day, this passion comes into sharper focus for me. It is a passion for scholarship that can address societal issues. A passion for research that creates new knowledge and approaches. A passion for this university’s growth and its place in the world. A passion for engagement that embraces diversity in all its forms.
Nineteen seventy-eight was the year I first landed in Boston. I knew only a few people and had no idea what to expect. I was a stranger in a strange land.
But, very early on, I was adopted by people who were warm and supportive. Some of them are here today. They made me feel truly welcome and gave me the foundation to build a life in this country that I consider my true home. Last fall, I was reminded of that warm welcome when I attended a reception for new Bostonians, sponsored by Mayor Menino.
It is now my turn, and yours, to reach out in the same way.
We will achieve our aspirations as an institution only if we continue to embrace and celebrate our diversity in all its forms. We cannot merely be a mirror of what society is; we should be a model of what society can do.
We are the latest participants in a journey that began in the YMCA so many years ago. Thousands preceded us.
You have entrusted me with the future of this institution. On behalf of the generations to come, I have the responsibility to uphold that trust.
I cannot succeed alone. Ours will be a shared success.
It will take our collective energy, effort, and passion.
I am deeply honored to share this trust with all of you.