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President's message, cont'd... This past May, I returned to the Binghamton University campus for Commencement weekend. A reward and responsibility of serving as president of the Alumni Association is speaking to new alumni during graduation ceremonies. For the first time since my graduation from law school, I donned cap and gown for the occasion. A record 3,351 students graduated from Harpur College and the graduate and professional schools and joined more than 78,500 of us as alumni. In my remarks, I told the graduates they will meet alumni everywhere they go -- as I did, to my surprise, in a shared cab in London. We have great expectations of these new alumni: that they will follow us with an even broader vision and commitment, because we learned at Binghamton the importance of giving back to our community, state and country, and we have a responsibility to ensure support for the education we received here so that others may learn and grow at Binghamton as we did. I urged them not to forget the alumni we lost on 9/11. As a memorial to these alumni, we need to remember what we learned here: that there is a greater purpose to serve and we must do it -- particularly in these perilous times. Each of the four honorary degree recipients: Sydney Pollack, director, producer and actor; Alan MacDiarmid, 2000 Nobel Prize-winning chemist; Dean Kamen, inventor and entrepreneur; and Mark Zurack '78, investment banker and philanthropist, spoke about education not ending, but beginning with Commencement. These speakers said they expected our new graduates to use their knowledge "to read the world to us," as Pollack put it. "And we need you all very, very badly," he said. "For the first time in my lifetime -- and that's a lot of years -- it's become very difficult to find real consensus out there." MacDiarmid noted that the amount of knowledge is increasing so rapidly, "if any graduate today goes out into the world and does not continue his self-education, within a few years that graduate . . . will be essentially useless to any future or present employer. . . . .what we receive in the university are the tools to continue our education after we leave." And Kamen said, " . . . remember, you have to give back, because you'll make your life by what you give." We live in a changed world, struggling to contribute to the improvement of life and happiness in the midst of turmoil and anxiety. Commencement words, spoken in a moment of excitement and reminiscence for new graduates, may not be remembered for very long. Yet the words delivered by these speakers are universal and applicable for each of us now. We need to pause and remember the excitement of learning, the joy of discovery and the rewards of giving back. Zurack, our own alumnus, who has endowed a distinguished professorship in finance and economics shared by the School of Management and Harpur College of Arts and Sciences, said it for all alumni in his concluding remarks: "Binghamton University gave me the opportunity to develop academically and personally, placing me at a level playing field with any graduate anywhere beginning a career. It's important to me that Binghamton thrive so others can have the same opportunity. For that to happen, Binghamton needs to stay one of the premier public universities in the U.S., and it can only do so if its alumni stay connected -- both with their time and money." During this weekend, I met some of the members of the Class of 2003. They are doing us proud. We have expectations of them as well as of ourselves -- to keep our shared vision of Binghamton alive! -- Joe Bress '66 You may reach Joe by mail at Binghamton University, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000; by fax: 607-777-2654; by phone: 607-777-2431; or by e-mail: alumni@binghamton.edu.
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