Remarks and Speeches
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Length of Service Breakfast
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April 29, 2011
Good morning and thank you for attending the second UMass Amherst Length of Service Award Celebration Breakfast. My name is Robert Holub and as Chancellor I am pleased all of you are here to celebrate with us today. The Length of Service Awards are recognitions of great importance on this campus. These awards not only highlight years of employment, they are markers of dedication, character, and of service to this great institution. This breakfast marks the first of several campus gatherings today that emphasize community, accomplishment, and most importantly respect for our colleagues. As you may be aware, today also marks the Founder’s Day celebration of the campus. After breakfast, if you have any room left, we hope that you and your colleagues will also join us for the Celebrate UMass Cookout on the Goodell lawn. Stop by for the entertainment, including a performance by the student group Wicked Pitch A Capella, stay to celebrate the football team’s move to the Football Bowl Subdivision with Coach Kevin Morris and the Minuteman Marching Band, enjoy a horse-drawn carriage ride around the center of campus, and then play a round of miniature golf, hosted at the Campus Pond by the Alumni Association and the Student Alumni Association. This is indeed a day of celebration and community.
Although this is only the second year for a Founder’s Day Length of Service Breakfast, these awards are a long-standing tradition on this campus. All of you here, along with you fellow honorees who could not join us, represent almost 8,000 years of service by faculty and staff from all areas of campus. We bring you together from the top of the library, to the basement of the Physical Plant, from Southwest Residential Area to the Cranberry Experiment Station to celebrate as one community. I know that many of you have worked in many different parts of campus and hope that this gathering reunites you with old friends and familiar faces.
You are the individuals who make the experience for the students here worthwhile, and you are one of the many points of pride that this institution holds dear. Thank you.
Next week, the UMass Amherst Center for Heritage and Society will be holding an important international conference on campus called “Why Does the Past Matter?” Scholars, public officials, and community leaders will examine the practical value of the past. They’ll look at such topics as “Collective Memory in a Globalized World, “ “Modernity, Identity, and the Value of Tradition,” and “Community Empowerment Through Heritage.”
Even though you’ve been here 20 years or more, I’m sure these aren’t issues you have a lot of time to ponder during the workday. You have been too busy demonstrating why the past matters. You have been showing less experienced colleagues the most efficient way to complete a job, advising coworkers or students on the ins and out of getting things done here on campus, or perhaps sharing a story about 1970s streakers or the 1980 campus water crisis. As long-standing employees, you embody the answer to the question, “Why Does the Past Matter?”
You hold the institutional memory of UMass Amherst, which is an invaluable resource as we look to rise to the top tier of national research universities. You have the most informed visions of the future of our campus. When scholars from around the world come to UMass Amherst to examine how to maintain a balance between appreciation of the past and awareness of the challenges of the future, they would do well to speak to veteran UMass Amherst employees.
The institutional memory of employees can help organizations thrive, as long as we resolve to learn from the past and not be confined by it.
