Currently a board member of the United Community Center, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and the Milwaukee Public Library Foundation, he was a member of the Governor s Commission on Schools for the 21 st Century. He is a member of the Board of Regents Education Committee and Committee on Board Effectiveness. During their college years they have had the opportunity to interact with those who are different from them. This interaction with the different, the very act of exposing your view of life to the challenge of criticism, these experiences implicate the habits of the mind habits of the soul habits of the heart that UW-Eau Claire has sought to instill, he said. It is up to you as the Eau Claire alumni to strengthen and nurture these habits.
Students also have the ability to learn, to create and to be passionate about ideas.
They have the ability to decide what is the good thing or right thing to do in a particular situation while accepting with humility the limits of their knowledge. We have the ability to contemplate and act in furtherance of what we think is right, what we think is moral, what we think is ethical, he said. I suggest we choose to think for ourselves, that we choose to seek what is good and determine what our responsibility is in the circumstances we face and then act consistently with what we believe is right, with what is our responsibility, Olivieri said. In a reference to a speech by Robert Kennedy following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he reminded students that the price of the choice of apathy by individuals is the violence of indifference and inaction and slow decay. In Kennedy s words, This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors.