Greetings everyone. I am Mike Pressimone, President of Notre Dame College. I delivered the following remarks to new Notre Dame students at the opening convocation on August 29. However, this message is something I would like to share with all members of our community.
Hello new Falcons and welcome back to our returning Falcons. Allow me to add my words of welcome as we begin this journey together. Like our new first year students or new transfer students, I consider myself a first-year student as well. To be sure, I have considerable experience in the higher education environment, but this place, this college, this community of students, faculty and staff are new to me. I have had the pleasure to serve as your president since early April, but, as you can imagine, many of the hours I spent in my office were lonely. I was one of only a few employees who came to the office daily.
Over the last several weeks there has been a marked change in the energy on campus as more and more people returned to prepare for your arrival. Your presence gives energy and purpose to my work. I am excited to begin this adventure with you.
Already, it’s unlike any journey I have had in higher education. This is certainly not the environment in which you expected to begin or continue your college education. Yet here we are. This current pandemic will require much of you and us as members of this community. As I have walked around campus this week, I have been pleased to see so many wearing facemasks and practicing the kind of community behavior that will keep you and all of us safe. There will come a time when you look back at this period, and you’ll say something like “remember when we started at Notre Dame College during the pandemic.” Perhaps it will be a story you will tell your children as they go off to college. I simply ask that you be attentive to yourselves and other members of the community so that we may all be safe and free from illness together. We can be a model community for others to follow by doing the simple things that will keep us safe. Wear your mask, wash your hands, and watch your distance. While we have a strong desire to celebrate this new year with our friends, now is not the time to be reckless or unwary. There will come a time when we can gather freely for such purposes.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 is not the only infection we are fighting in our country at this time. Racism continues to be a plague that threatens the very fabric of our communities. Unlike COVID-19 for which we hope someday to have a vaccination or a therapeutic drug, no such miracle cure exists to cure the disease of racism which has been with us for more than 400 years. We must change the hearts of people one person at a time.
For those of us who grew up in the civil rights era, we thought we would have made progress by this early part of the 21st century. But as we see day after day, we do not have equality in this country. We have seen attacks on immigrants, the LGBTQ members of our communities, members of diverse religious beliefs, and, in particular through a tragic series of events this summer, black men and women.
Even as many good men and women lead the fight for social justice and civil rights, these topics are too often politicized in ways that give rise to incendiary language and drown out public civil discourse. Divisive, angry rhetoric will likely grow louder in the months leading to the November presidential election. But we can make the choice to rise above that fray.
Like I’ve called on you to be a model community in response to the pandemic, I call on you to be a model community engaged in thoughtful civil discourse about racism in America today. We must be attentive to the thoughts, opinions, hearts and minds of each member of our Notre Dame community. Conversations about these topics can be difficult, but difficult conversations need to happen. They need to happen because it is part of our educational mission to expand the hearts and minds of our students and each other and because it will help us build stronger and more peaceful communities. I call on all of you to deepen your understanding of those whose experiences are different than your own.
During my time in St. Louis, I was fortunate to get to know an African American civil rights icon, Ms. Frankie Freeman. She was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to serve on the civil rights commission in the 1960s. I got to know her when she was 98 or 99 years old and she was still vibrant. At a gathering with students and members of our community there, she simply asked the question and I paraphrase “have you ever just turned around and spoken to someone who didn’t look like you?”
I challenge each of you to do that. Reach out to someone and learn something about them. Try to understand their humanity. Understand their perspectives. There will surely be disagreements, and I have no Pollyanna ideal that we will all agree and live in some utopia, but we should be able to walk away from those conversations with a deeper understanding and respect.
Informed by my faith, I see each one of you as a beautiful creation of a loving God. It was faith that called the Sisters of Notre Dame into being and eventually brought them to the United States, to Cleveland, to teach the children of German immigrants. As those German immigrants became a part of the fabric of Cleveland and northeastern Ohio, the sisters did not declare that their work had been completed. Rather, they looked to the next group that needed their educational zeal. Over time it became clear that part of their mission was to serve the underserved in urban communities throughout the country. I stand before this beautiful diverse group of young women and men as we continue to animate and carry out the mission of the Sisters of Notre Dame through education. As young adults, you are expected to learn in the classroom and be attentive to your academic pursuits, but we also expect you to learn from one another. This is a learning environment. Take advantage of it. I have confidence that you can succeed here in developing your intellectual capacity and skills that will lead to a life of work, and that you will also leave here prepared to live peacefully in an ever more diverse world.
As we bring this convocation to a close, let me reflect for one moment on that word and expand a bit on the definition in your program. Convocation is derived from the Latin convoco or convocare. Voco or vocare means to call and con means together, so a convocation is to call together.
Let this coming together, this convocation, be a beginning of the time that we come together as members of the Notre Dame College community. I, along with my faculty and staff colleagues, will stand with you as seekers of peace and understanding.
It is now my pleasure to officially accept the members of the class of 2024 and all new students to Notre Dame College. Thank you for joining our community, and God bless all of you as we begin this journey together.