Campus memorial service for victims
of September 11 terrorist attacks—Sept. 14, 2001
Remarks by David C. Hardesty Jr.
President, West Virginia University
Today, we gather as a community. And today we realize just how large our community is. It includes the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the University and, of course, their families. We are also joined by community, state, local officials, and friends.
We come from all over our nation and our world to be together here in West Virginia. Our roots are in all fifty American states and one hundred nations. It is strikingly clear that we live, truly, in a “global village” connected by common aspirations, commerce, television, the Internet, military and political alliances, by easy worldwide travel, and by the global nature of institutions of higher education like WVU.
At another university sixty years ago, Winston Churchill said, “The price of greatness is responsibility. If this has been proved in the past, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.” How true these words ring today.
This week, America’s involvement in the world led to human tragedy of the worst kind – thousands have lost their lives in a terrorist attack on the United States. We are only beginning to understand the magnitude of what has happened. The loss of lives and property is unimaginable. The implications are grave.
Because of our national mobility and our connectivity, we all know, or know someone who does know, a family member or friend who has been injured or killed in the recent attacks on our homeland. Entire households have been lost. Flourishing businesses have suffered irreparable harm. Great futures have been extinguished. Accumulated wisdom and knowledge will not be shared. The suffering is great. Millions grieve as we gather here today.
We all must share in the losses of those who have been touched by these terrible acts. They have our sympathy. This University – the entire University community – extends its condolences and prayers to all such persons. Our hearts are open to them.
As we gather today, the issues presented to our leaders and to each of us are complex and multifaceted. What has happened saddens us, not only because of personal losses, but because there has been a frontal assault on our way of life. Our liberty and freedom have been challenged. Clearly, the goal has been to dampen our spirits and patriotism.
But, as surely as we must show our support of those who have lost their loved ones, we must also show our confidence in the future of democracies around the world.
Men and women who valued freedom above all else founded America. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “We were born to exemplify the virtues of democracy and to extend the frontiers of the principles of self-government throughout the world.”
At a time of great tragedy during his own time, President Lincoln said that our nation should be dedicated to the “great task remaining before it,” and that our nation must resolve that those who died to preserve our democracy shall not have died in vain.
As America grew as a nation, we changed, assuming greater and greater responsibility in the world. By 1943, when we faced the threats of the maniacal Nazis, Winston Churchill would say of the United States: “There is no halting place at this point. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks.”
Later, when we struggled with conflicting values within our nation, Martin Luther King Jr. asked us to use our heritage and our anger to cause freedom to ring across America and around the world.
It is now our time, and this is a time that tests our sense of mission and responsibility. The world looks on, awaiting our reaction to the tragedy we have experienced. Our national character is again being tested.
Our response must be a clarion call for justice. For this reason, if no other, we must now summon all the determination our generation can muster in defense of the freedoms we enjoy. We have no choice if we are to truly honor those who have died as a result of terrorist activities within our country and beyond its borders.
This will be an effort unlike any before it. We will all be asked to do our part. It will require individual and collective discipline and it will require individual and collective civic responsibility. It will require individual and collective acts of bravery and courage.
But we cannot act unjustly. We may even need to refrain from acting. Our University community includes many who belong to other nationalities. We must not harbor animosity toward our neighbors simply because they come from other places in the world. Rather, we must all do our part to foster the global peace we all seek.
In the months to come, we will each be called upon to serve in ways we do not yet comprehend. We must each answer the call when it comes, however it comes.
And so, today we grieve for those thousands who have been needlessly lost. We all are deeply saddened and we join fervently with the millions who pray for peace in the world.
But even as we grieve, and even as we seek to understand, we will stand united in our search for justice. We must look into our own hearts, and summon the individual and collective courage and strength we will need to keep America the home of the brave and land of the free – and keep the flame of freedom alive in the world. Because we are Mountaineers, we can do nothing less.
Montani semper liberi. Mountaineers are always free.