UB President Asks Campus Community to be Cautious in Personal Responses to Terrorist Attacks

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo President William R. Greiner Thursday asked students, faculty and staff to continue to value and protect UB's multi-ethnic and multi-religious community in their personal responses to this week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"We on this campus must be especially concerned about our responses to this horror," he said at a Remembrance Program attended by more than 1,500 students and faculty and staff members in UB's Center for the Arts.

"We are a community of learners, heavily drawn from New York State, but having great and broad representation from around the world, and that even the more in our New York citizenry, since we are so cosmopolitan in our makeup.

"We are much richer for being a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community," Greiner noted. "We must treasure and protect that aspect of our community."

UB's president also asked those in attendance to "pray for our leaders to have the wisdom to determine how we can and should respond to these new realities without doing great injustice in our search for justice."

Following are Greiner's comments at the program:

"I begin with a selection from John Donne-16th century British scholar, public servant and clergyman:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friend's or of thy own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. ('Meditation XVII', Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)

Tuesday the wisdom of John Donne was driven home to us with numbing and awful effect.

Clearly we Americans are not an island entire to ourselves; we are very much a part of the main; we now share what citizens of Belfast, Tel Aviv, London, Sarajevo and Srebenica, Rwanda and other places have experienced as the result of sectarian or ethnic or politically based terrorism.

In less global terms all of us in the US, but especially in New York, have been directly assaulted by these vicious acts. We New Yorkers have seen our intellectual, cultural and commercial capital brutally assaulted. We at UB have shared in this loss-parents, relatives, friends of UB students, staff and faculty are among the victims as are many UB alumni. Our UB family has been assaulted by this horror.

When the bell of sorrow and remembrance tolls, it truly tolls for all of us, for all of humankind.

What will we do about this? As a nation, we will first deal with the suffering of our citizens, then we will turn to restoring our wounded city and our wounded psyche; but very soon-indeed already-our thoughts will turn to pursuit of justice, of retribution, of revenge-for surely anger is already seething among us.

When I talked with students in the Union on Tuesday, I said to many of them 'This is your Pearl Harbor'. I am just barely old enough to remember Pearl Harbor. It was an evil event, but it ultimately led to some enormous good, though at horrendous cost. Then it was simple to respond to an act of war; nations made war; we went to war with other nations. Now it is not so simple; now our wars are about culture, religion, language, ethnicity-all root causes of past wars-but now detached from identifiable nation states.

Pray for our leaders to have the wisdom to determine how we can and should respond to these new realities without doing great injustice in our search for justice.

We on this campus must be especially concerned about our responses to this horror. We are a community of learners, heavily drawn from New York State-but having great and broad representation from around the world, and that even the more in our New York citizenry, since we are so cosmopolitan in our makeup. We are much richer for being a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community. We must treasure and protect that aspect of our community.

The suspicion-and perhaps it may be fact-will be that these acts of terror were committed by persons from or connected to what is sometimes called the Islamic world. If that be so, then know that these acts are also a desecration of Islamic faith and culture.

The great text of Islam, the Koran, teaches that 'the servants of the Beneficent God are they who walk on the earth in humbleness, and when the ignorant address them, they say: Peace,' and 'Peace is a word from a merciful God' (25.63 and 36.58).

We will and must seek justice, and that may lead to retribution, but we must also seek Peace as our ultimate good, and we must not allow our anger, our fear, our horror to cause us to assign guilt by association to those who may share religious or cultural or ethnic connections to whomever may be the perpetrators of these awful acts.

We are in a new of kind of war, brought to us from many causes and requiring many difficult and complex responses. We are a part of the main; we are and must be involved in humankind, even as we deal with this new kind of war. One of our greatest leaders addressed similar concerns near the end of an American Civil War. In his second inaugural address Lincoln provided a text to guide us:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Salam, Shalom, Peace."