As we celebrate the one-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first and oldest College or University in the more than three-hundred years of the history of our Institute, I would like my presence here with you today to be a sign of the importance that our Institute places on higher education. In addition, I would want my presence to be a sign of sympathy for and close ties with the city of New York, which one year ago was the object of one of the most terrible terrorist attacks in human history. I consider it a great privilege to be with you university Lasallians today and to share an educational charism that emerged within the Church for the service of the world. I feel that I represent the 6,500 Brothers of the Christian Schools and the 65,000 partners who carry out their educational mission as professors, administrators, and teachers in formal and non-formal educational programs or in leadership teams.

I accept this academic degree in their name, as a recognition of what this international association does in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the entire Pacific region, Europe, the United Sates and Canada.

I am personally convinced of the important role of higher education in the Lasallian world and especially on the American continent where you have been pioneers and where we have the greatest number of institutions. In fact, of the 61 institutions of higher education that we have in the world, 42 of them are located in the Americas. Our centers, as the Catholic and Lasallian Universities that they are, in fidelity to the founding charism of our association, have always had a great concern for seeing to it that our programs are accessible to the poor, who otherwise could not possibly obtain a higher education. In the same way, there is concern that our work contribute to the "common good", to the development of justice and peace in all the countries in which we work. Unfortunately, many of these countries have been torn apart by economic, social, and political crises and by wars.

We want to be an effective sign of hope for our young people who many times live without hope. You, as an institution of higher learning, have the spaces for dialogue that other institutions for young people do not have. You can support programs for comprehensive development, thereby increasing the professionalism of your personnel, preparing teachers better, evaluating programs already in existence, generating new research, presenting new alternatives, helping to find new financial resources that will allow new initiatives in favor of the poor and marginalized to function, and being interlocutors before national and international organizations.

Manhattan College's 150 years that we celebrate today are not only an occasion to look at the past and thank our predecessors for the journey that they made, but also to look towards the future and to commit ourselves to building up a better society, inspired in Christian values and in the Gospel as read by John Baptist de La Salle.

Today we are invited to live in solidarity. We are called to knock down all walls of ill will and separation that remain in our world and to see to it that all benefit from human progress.

As a Lasallian university it is important to ask ourselves if we are active agents of a sustainable development that is environmental, social, economic, political and cultural. I would like to invite you to live out this sesquicentennial year looking forward, certainly without forgetting your roots, to imagine new ways in which to respond to today's problems, being creative in initiatives and offering those who remain outside the benefits of globalization that we experience today, new roads, stimulating initiatives and alternatives able to give meaning to their lives.

Many times the educational system, even at the university level, opts more for the traditional rather than for the innovative. Today, we should overcome this tendency, giving more energy to our ability to invent, to create, because what is at stake is the future of humankind and its survival. In this area there are two challenges that seek urgent responses: ecology and inter-cultural coexistence. Both seem to me to be priorities for the United States.

And at the university level the change is even more necessary given the fact that in our world changes are of such magnitude that it has been said that after five years, the structure of professions has changed in such a way that without a personal, dynamic updating, we can easily be out of step. There is no doubt today that it is more important to have the ability to continue learning than to know a lot of facts; and the best university will give priority to the first item. It is important not to content ourselves with the innate tendency to repeat structures rather than to seek a way to modify or improve them, especially those structures that will ensure a more just world and a more participatory society. It is not enough to describe events if we do not have the ability to control them and to put them at the service of humanity.

In any case each of us is called to put the gifts we have received at the service of others so that we can live our life, not only as a profession, but and above all as a vocation that allows all of us, teachers and students, to commit ourselves to the building of a society based on ethical values and an honest and humble search for truth and justice in the world.

Again, I thank you very much in the name of the Institute, for the honor granted me and I want to congratulate especially the five professors who represent the schools of Art, Business, Education, Engineering and Science, selected by their colleagues as distinguished Lasallian Educators, as well as the seniors who have been inducted into Epsilon Sigma Pi.