President Luis M. Proenza's September 11th Message

"We Remember!"

At The University of Akron, tragedy hit close to home as we lost one of our own. University of Akron Alumnus, William Moskal, a 1988 graduate from our School of Law, was at the World Trade Center that morning for a company meeting. Our thoughts and prayers are with Bill’s widow and two children during this very difficult time.

It is fitting this morning that we should gather together on a university campus – your University campus – a place where the positive creativity of the human spirit is so brightly and so often reflected.

And that is because, as many of you have heard me say, universities are magical places – places where you can dream, and dare, and do the things that it takes to change the world.

Our country is a nation of immigrants founded by people seeking the opportunity of freedom.

As an immigrant myself, I know from experience that the opportunity of freedom brings with it the freedom of opportunity, and thus the responsibility to be true to the intent of our founding fathers.

And that intent, indeed the very basis of America’s success, is based on the principle that in creating a government, we make a covenant with ourselves . . .

. . . A covenant wherein we promise to continuously build a better future for ourselves and for our children by advancing the common good, ensuring that each successive generation is better educated than that of its parents.

And that is the magic of universities!

It lies in the relentless pursuit of truth, in the progressive discovery of knowledge, and most of all, in the connectedness of life and in the awareness that we can, and we must, advance our common future.

I can think of no better words than those of Nobel Prize winner George Wald – a biologist – to capture for us the spirit and power of knowledge.

“Surely this is a great part of our dignity . . . that we can know, and that through us matter can know itself; that beginning with protons and electrons, out of the womb of time and the vastness of space, we can begin to understand; that organized as in us, the hydrogen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen, those 16 to 21 elements, the water, the sunlight – all, having become us, can begin to understand what they are, and how they came to be.” (George Wald, quoted in: Philip Ball, Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 2000, Page 3.)