Until next time, Thomas C. Galvin Jr. President, Onondaga Community College Student Government. The opening of the Ralph and Fay Whitney Applied Technology Center is one of the most important events in Onondaga Community College's recent history. Below is a transcript of a speech I made at the Grand Opening. Technology is all around us. What began as rough tools hewn from rock and carved from wood evolved into complex machines that allow us to transcend our physical limitations and communicate across vast distances, and has become one of the cornerstones of our society.
Technology is an increasingly pervasive and integral part of modern life.
These demands also extend to our educational institutions, which must adapt to the changing times and provide their students with the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in this hi-tech environment. We have unprecedented power to understand and manipulate the world around us, and the responsibility to care for the world we have been given. Technology is the key to all of this, and the person who is denied access to technology is in large part denied access to the future. Onondaga Community College provides a unique service to the Central New York area, offering higher education to those who might otherwise be denied access, and ensuring that the local economy will have a crop of well trained professionals from which to draw. OCC must continually adapt itself to compliment the state of the art and the needs of those it serves, and this building in a reflection of that necessity.