for
the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts
September 7, 2001
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Community Breakfast marks a new school year by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff  any Auxiliary Services staff members arrived before sunrise Aug. 30 to prepare the Franklin Dining Commons seating and food for the 35th annual Community Breakfast. About 250 people from around campus and the local communities came to kick off the school year and celebrate relationships among local individuals and institutions.Members of local government and business, including state Representatives Nancy Flavin (D-Easthampton) and Stephen Kulik (D-Worthington) and Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, select board members from Belchertown, Shutesbury, Greenfield and Amherst, and representatives from Five Colleges Inc., Mount Holyoke College, and Greenfield and Holyoke community colleges, attended. In addition to University officials, student trustee Jon Laubinger and Student Government Association president John Sheehan attended. About 10 members of the Graduate Employees Organization, United Auto Workers Local 2322 passed out leaflets and displayed signs calling for the unionization of graduate instructors in Continuing Education. Mark Ellsworth, '72, president of the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce, addressed the group, thanking the higher education institutions for bringing "the gift of diversity" to the local communities and welcoming students, faculty, and staff back for another school year. He spoke of "empathetic business," grounded in gratitude, and said a welcoming event for students sponsored by the chamber will take place on the Amherst Common Sept. 12. Interim Chancellor Marcellette Williams continued Ellsworth's theme of the importance of values. "I've had an opportunity to review many of our excellences," she said. "It has given me pause to ask the question: How have we managed to accomplish what we have accomplished? The answer has to do with community. "I think of community as a place where together people agree to live in a vital and constructive interdependence, where people matter, where there is a tacit agreement to create opportunities and to seek solutions to challenges together, where growth in one part of the community enhances vitality in another, where together people commit and recommit to identifying and living shared values. "I want us here today together to revitalize the campus and our communities from a firm platform of shared values, cooperative and collaborative efforts." Williams said some of the values held by the community are fairness, diligence, loyalty, a passion for continuing traditions of excellence, determination, perseverance, a harmony of parts, conscientiousness, integrity, respect and cooperation. "Our larger community is, in a sense, a tapestry whose overall integrity is dependent upon the strength, resilience and interconnectedness of each of its threads," she said. "For the University, this weaving together of parts has constituted our mission from our land grant beginnings. Today we are renewing that mission in the conscious context of community, where we view the creation of knowledge and research as a public trust. We view its dissemination to our students, traditional and lifelong, as a moral vocation, and we also view the application of that knowledge and research beyond the boundaries of the campus as a societal obligation." Williams also told the group that reflecting on its accomplishments together would pave the way for future successes. |
