This is an important message. I do not believe it is possible to create community. Rather, community is something that happens. It happens when people speak to one another and listen to one another in an effort to discern the truth and to discover themselves in the process. It happens only in an environment of freedom and openness.
Community happens only in an atmosphere of honesty and tolerance.
Community happens when people care about one another and when they are willing to take responsibility for themselves as well as for each other. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the common world. Renewing the common world must be our ultimate goal. In the final analysis, what we are as a University is not determined by rankings or prizes, important as they may be.