A year ago I was announced as the new president of Saint Vincent College. Three events this past week on our campus underscore how lucky I am to be here.

Monday began with the dreadful news from Blacksburg. It was a day of shock and grief that made it hard for our students here to focus on classes because of the raw sadness. However, we kept to our schedule and tried to have as normal of a week as possible. On Tuesday night, after a moving opening prayer by Archabbot Douglas, our Chancellor, for the Virginia Tech community, we had a remarkable forum in the Carey Lounge on President Bush’s upcoming commencement speech. On Wednesday in memory of the victims and families at Virginia Tech, we held two separate memorials on campus that were very well-attended – a noon Mass and an evening candlelight prayer service. And on Thursday we had nearly 500 students, faculty and locals in the Carey Center Auditorium to hear lectures by two men of God – Dr. Scott Hahn and Dr. Brant Pitre. They spoke of Pope Benedict’s theology and the Old Testament connections of Jesus’ beautiful prayer, the Our Father.

All three of these events wove together threads of our Catholic, Benedictine liberal arts identity that has bound us together these 161 years.

First, the forum on President Bush. Students wanted an opportunity to express their opinions on the fact that President Bush will be our College’s keynote speaker at the Class of 2007 commencement exercises. The 250 seats we put out for the gathering weren’t enough – we had probably 400 people packed into the Lounge to listen to a parade of students state their views on President Bush’s impending appearance on our campus.

The forum was for our students and it was run by our students. The time was equally divided between pro and con views, except that one student who identified himself as neutral spoke at the end (and in some ways synthesized the discussion and brought both sides together). Each student’s take on having the President of the United States here was different and unique. Some mixed humor with seriousness. Others pulled no punches. No one took cheap shots. C-SPAN taped the proceedings and will air a portion of them at a date to be announced, and you can also watch the entire program on SVC in-house cable.

I can’t fully describe how impressed I was Tuesday with our students and their eloquence. It isn’t easy to stand up in front of your peers and deliver a speech on a controversial subject. It is even more difficult when you are on cable network television! What I saw amazed me – nervousness gave way to the power of the speaker’s conviction; humor mixed with pointed barbs; and applause greeted the conclusion of each speaker’s presentation.

The students who spoke in opposition to President Bush’s coming were particularly courageous. It took a lot of guts to stand there and criticize President Bush with the Archabbot and me sitting there. They knew that the Archabbot had invited the President and that I worked for him and continue to enjoy a friendship with him. Nonetheless, over a dozen Saint Vincent students took to the floor to protest the President’s coming and they did it forcefully but respectfully.

Proponents of the President’s visit also made persuasive arguments. By evening’s end, the hundreds of students who attended had been treated to a wide-ranging debate by students that stuck to the issues and didn’t demonize the views of their opponents. The discussion stuck to the issues. Roommates could wholeheartedly disagree and still be friends. It was a splendid display of civility, maturity, and intellectual rigor. Steve Leuschel, SGA President, moderated the program with an even-handedness and every speaker was heard. He and Nathan Harig, Jack Miniotis, Roxanne Ruminski, and Laura Krulikowski who helped organize time allocation and speaker schedules deserve kudos for jobs well done.

The art of dissent and assent is nearly a lost art. Today you see Jerry Springer-like public debates – people shouting and personalizing every argument. The media wants as much conflict and chaos as possible. In Christianity, there is a saying, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” However, in public discourse American style, the maxim is “hate the opinion AND the person with it.” A Catholic, Benedictine College called Saint Vincent displayed a rare elegance and I think that owes to the quality of our student body.

A year ago you were all strangers to me and Mary and my children. You are no more. After a year of the Toweys in the cafeteria, at sporting and cultural events, and at other College gatherings, I have gotten to meet nearly all of you – some better than others. The hundred or so who have come to my house, and the scores of you who have come to my office, and the dozen of you who will be joining me next month on a trip to Calcutta, I know a little better than the rest of you. But still, I think I hit my goal this year of meeting each student who was willing (and those who didn’t want to meet me also met their goal!).

I remember the press conference announcing my appointment. Chairman of the Board Chris Donahue, Archabbot Douglas and my predecessor, Jim Will, were on hand in the Carey Center Lounge for a series of brief statements. It was on that day I was first introduced to the reason I took the job – you students. I met Kim Stevens and the other Student Government Association officials. It was all so brief. But my wife and I left so impressed with them and we wondered if the whole student body was like them.

Keep in mind I was not a stranger to college campuses. Because President Bush could accept only a handful of invitations to speak at public events, I often found myself speaking on college campuses and lecturing students. During my four-plus years at the White House, I spoke at Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Virginia, among others.

When I met with students at those fine institutions, the truth is, I left with mixed emotions. I was impressed with them but also felt a little sorry for some of them. I got the sense that for many of them, their whole lives had been about competing and achieving. So many had been told how gifted they were and the expectations for them were so high. I got the feeling that many of their parents’ dreams (either realized or abandoned) had been projected on to their lives. For these young men and women, high school and now college were a crucible of high expectations and demands and while their colleges were founded as faith-based colleges, there was little I could see that reflected any spirituality or conviction about the pursuit of moral truth. Moral relativism seemed to prevail on these campuses. As a result, some of these students found themselves intellectually challenged and morally impoverished by these leading institutions of higher education. That’s why I felt a little sorry for them.

At Saint Vincent, we have a diverse student body with plenty of high academic performers and achievers on campus who work hard in the midst of demanding lives, and all students know that getting a degree here will require great effort. But I get the sense that in general our students have had different family experiences than many at the Ivy League schools I mentioned. Many of our students are first generation college students. Many come from very modest means and can hardly be described as spoiled or entitled and their parents make tremendous sacrifices to send their son or daughter here. Yes, our students have fun and party, and the huge crowd in the gymnasium last Friday for the OAR concert attested to that. We have students who are of different faiths or no faith at all. But there is balance here. The Catholic, Benedictine values at Saint Vincent have stood the test of time for over 160 years and our graduates absorb them, and when they leave here they are well-prepared to enter the world and make a living for themselves and a difference for others.

That is why so many students came to the prayer services last week, praying for strangers in Blacksburg who weren’t strangers any more. We were united with them before God in sorrow. We feel the immediate aftershock of any tragedy that befalls a college or university. Saint Vincent baseball players knew this well when they headed to Florida during spring break to play baseball against Bluffton - a team who never arrived in Florida because of a heartbreaking bus accident that took life with the same suddenness as in Blacksburg.

When tragedies like this occur, at Saint Vincent prayer isn’t a matter of last resort but one of first resort. The Pitre and Hahn lectures Thursday had the indirect effect of reminding our campus community that in spite of the Virginia Tech tragedy, God is still with us and still loves us, and that life is still good.

That message has been at the heart of my first year as your president. I am very grateful to you students for delivering it to me.