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[ Applause ]
>> Dr. Honora Chapman: Corey, thank you so much and thank you Tamar and Andrew and Breanne
and all the members of USU Productions and all the students out there as well as the
community members. In order to give this auguste inauguration of a Talk Series the right flavor,
I need to get into costume. It's all about this. All right, okay.
[ Applause ]
It works. Now I'm going to switch. Hello, you can hear me. Okay, excellent. Good evening
and welcome. The topic tonight of course is Eureka and you're going to learn what that
means and hopefully you're going to discover a little bit about yourself. Okay, anyone
know where that's from, besides California? It's Sacramento, it's the capital. It is a
stained glass window depicting the great seal of the State of California and you see the
motto of California right there. Eureka, we are the Eureka State, 31 stars because we
were the 31st state allowed into the Union, the goddess Minerva, Athena who sprung from
the head of Zeus or Jupiter and that is because we were never a territory. We went from being
a place that was Mexican, it was part of Mexico, to becoming straight a state after the war
of the Mexican-American War and the subsequent treaty. Then you have the boats on what is
either the river Sacramento River or the Bay of San Francisco and of course, the miner
which is where the word Eureka probably emanates. But you also have the grisly bear and what
you can't see is the stalk of wheat because you probably don't realize we grew a ton of
wheat here in the 1850s and 60s but it's not happening much these days and then there are
grapes as well. This is the California that you live and study in and this is the California
that is provided you the opportunity to discover what you want to do with you lives. This is
the Eureka State. Now, where do we get that phrase though? Eureka is really the Greek
Heureka. Heureka means, I have discovered it and it is ancient Greek. It's the first
person singular, perfect active indicative of the verb Heurisko and that's what I teach,
so, but it's more than that. This hat is annoying me, excuse me. It's more than that because
it is in fact Heureka, what did that do? I have no idea, there. Excuse me. Eureka exactly,
Archimedes said it. Anyone know who Archimedes was? He was the greatest, ancient, scientist
and mathematician. He said, "I found it" according to the Vitruvius, because he found the displacement
of his body in the bathtub and he was so excited by this discovery of the difference in mass
once he got into the bathtub and the water ran out, that he got up out of the bathtub
and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse screaming, "I found it, Eureka. Heureka."
And that's what I'm hoping you will do except for the nakedness part. You will discover
what you want to do with your lives and you will go ahead and do it. Now he did amazing
things besides discovering that. He helped the ruler of Syracuse discover that a craftsman
had gypped him in the amount of gold in his gold crown. And he discovered the value of
Pi which you might regret in your math classes. And he manufactured the Claw. The Claw was
this device that he could stretch out over the water and lift up Roman ships and dump
them, sprinkling the men out of them. And that's just like Buzz Lightyear being grabbed
by the claw which you can barely see. It was Archimedes who developed that. He was the
man who invented it. The Roman's however, wanted to capture him in order to find out
more about his science but unfortunately the soldier killed him before they got to the
bottom of his science. Many hundreds of years later, people started reading his manuscripts
and they understood more about spheres and the measurements of such objects and that
is where we really get the basis of modern mathematical discoveries. Now another part
of Greek Wisdom is the wisdom that comes from philosophy, not just from mathematics and
science. And the greatest teacher of all was Socrates and Socrates was not a professional
teacher. He didn't earn a living doing it, he was a stonemason. He probably helped build
some of those ruins that people visit in Athens these days. He was a normal citizen craftsman
but he went around town and he asked young people annoying questions. And one of those
young people was a man named Euthydemus a young man. He was also known as Ho Ku Klos
[phonetic] because he was really good looking. And he said "Euthydemus, tell me, Have you
ever gone to Delphi?" Delphi is this gorgeous place in Central Greece not too far from Athens
and Euthydemus consequently said, "Yes, twice." "Then did you notice somewhere on the temple
the inscription know yourself, gnothi sauton?""I did." "And did you pay no heed to the inscription
or did you attend to it and try to consider who you were?" "Indeed, I did not. Because
I felt sure that I knew that already for I could hardly know anything else if I didn't
even know myself." Euthydemus thinks he's got it all figured out. He's about 18 years
old and he is famous in Athens for owning a bunch of books and claiming that he can
teach himself by reading books. What Socrates tells him is you need a teacher. You need
someone to help you. And that's of course, why so many of you are in school because you
want to learn from people who can help you see the light. So Socrates goes off on this
long rather boring analogy with horses and you can read it for yourself about when you
choose horses, does a teenager really seem to know himself who knows his own name merely
or he who, like people buying horses, who do not think that they know the horse that
they want to know until they have ascertained whether he is tractable or unruly, whether
he is strong or weak, swift or slow and how he is as to other points which are serviceable
or disadvantageous in the use of a horse so he--you noticed you feel asleep, right. And
Euthydemus, he does this to all his students. He keeps creating these analogies and trying
to beat you with words until you submit and the students always do basically and he continues
having ascertained with regard to himself how he is adapted for the service of mankind
knows his own abilities. "It appears to me" says Euthydemus, "I must confess that he who
does not know his own abilities, does not know himself." And the point Socrates is trying
to make is that Euthydemus actually doesn't know his own abilities and that's what Socrates
wants to teach him and that's hopefully what you will have as an experience in college
and beyond. Socrates says to him, "Isn't it evident that men enjoy a great number of blessings
in consequence of knowing themselves and incur a great number of evils through being deceived
in themselves for they know, they who know themselves know what is suitable for them
and distinguish between what they can do and what they can't. His point is you shouldn't
fool yourself. You need to figure out what it is that makes you happy in terms of what
you can do best and consequently, you will lead a happier life, a more fortunate life.
From my own experience, I tried to know myself by thinking about what I don't know which
usually involves technology, like right now. I really did have a career in Silicon Valley
at one point as a tester. They would give me software and I would perpetually not know
what to do. And I was invaluable to this company actually because I was a contractor as a grad
student and I would sit down with the manual and say, "I have no idea how to use this product."
And that was something I knew about myself. I am scared of technology, partially because
of my parents but at the same time I appreciate it and I appreciate people who can use it.
And that's what you have to figure out about yourself. You have to figure it out. But the
question is how? How do you figure out what to do with yourself? And a very wise philosopher
who is not Socrates said, "Do you not know that in the race all the runners run but only
one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize." In order to get the prize
as St. Paul says, "You've got to run like you have a purpose and you want to win." These
are students who are running on the stadium at Delphi. Delphi was a sanctuary of Apollo
where people met every few years to have games like at Olympia and today you can do that.
Stadium is not a place. It's a distance, 600 feet. This man ran the race. Do you remember
him from the Olympics, Stephen Kiprotich of Uganda? He was supposed to lose but he surpassed
the Kenyan runners at the 38th kilometer and he made the finish line first. Lots of us
here tonight were not the frontrunners because for whatever reason we weren't expected to
be the winners but if you keep working hard, like Kiprotich, you too can succeed. My theory
is you have to just keep the pace. You have to not give up. You have to set your goals
and figure out what you do best and then by all means do it. But the thing is that it
takes steps and by saying keep the pace, what I mean is you have to keep in mind four different
elements. And these four elements are ones that we will spell out and because this is
getting too academic, I am in fact going to start a game with you and I hope you enjoy
it and Andrew is going to help me with it. The first letter is P. What do you think P
fills out for? If you're going to win, what do you think you need?
>> [Multiple speakers]
>> Persistence, perseverance, patience, passion, I heard it down here. Passion, passion there
was another passion, Juan, well done. I did not tell Juan. Perseverance is true but passion
is what lights you up. It's what makes you want to do something even when it's really
hard. Now, why I do what I do is not because of any magic, it's because of my family. And
so I show you these strangely quaint, old photos because people like Sister Mary Ephrem
and you have to love Catholic education because they give the Nun's both women's and men's
names, Sister Mary Ephrem. She inspired my older sister Connie who was actually the second,
Vickie was the first and then Angela and there's me, unhappy because that's an itchy dress.
And Connie you can see on her graduation day from 8th grade is happy though she regrets
that hairdo today when I showed her the photo and she and my older sister, Vickie were extremely
important for me because they showed me that academic excellence really, really matter.
My sister Angela however, showed me that perseverance in the sense of not giving up is extraordinarily
important and she also was an amazing athlete which I learned to try to emulate but never
quite as successfully. And then that's me standing next to my little brothers at Christmas
time. Do you see what I have on my shirt? It's not what you expect. It's the Playboy
Bunny. Now, why do I have this? Because we went to the beach and I said I wanted a shirt
of the Easter Bunny and my next lesson is my mother, God Bless her, she tried to talk
me out of it and I refused. I was persistent and finally she gave in she was bored by the
argument and she let me wear that for two and a half years. I went around the neighborhood.
I went to the store wearing that. She had an amazing sense of humor. She could walk
with a straight face into a grocery store with me wearing that. That's my mom and that's
my dad who is an extraordinary person. He loved all eight of us. He was always there
talking to us on the weekends and that's the baby Octavia. He also had a sense of humor.
He named her number eight because she was. One thing that they taught us by virtue of
being taught by their parents was that education deeply mattered. My dad's mother went to Berkley
when it looked like this at the turn of the century but because she met my grandfather
in Merced and she thought he was so handsome, she decided to leave Berkeley and go to the
California State Normal School at San Jose in order to get her teaching credential because
she wanted to get married sooner. I don't recommend that automatically, but what I would
say is that you have to know her instinct was she was a teacher and that is what most
of us became in our family. My grandfather however, was a rancher and what my father
instilled in us was that this land, this central valley really is precious. Chowchilla, which
people make fun of now was a town that my grandmother turned the first spade of earth
for it. It was the gateway to one hundred and eight thousand acres of opportunity for
a colony. It was a place where people were going to build lives and my mother married
my dad because she saw the courthouse in Merced and thought okay I can leave L.A. for that,
seriously. And my passion is finally my immediate family, my son Will and my husband Bill Scuben
[assumed spelling] who is not here tonight because he is teaching. He teaches grad classes
and he could not miss his class because that's how much he respects his graduate students
that he couldn't bail out on them. I show you this because my great grandfather was
an immigrant from that incredibly poor village Corte Clarian, West Ireland where they basically
starved to death. His mother finally died and he came to the United States and what
would have blown his mind is that I returned to that country and I was invited to be a
scholar in a country at a university, Trinity in Dublin where he wasn't even allowed to
go because he was the wrong religion. And you see what America gave all of our families
was opportunity and that's the miracle of this place. What I discovered in high school
was that I loved Latin and that's what I teach now at Fresno State along with Greek. I did
four years of it with a Nun with another girl boy name, Sister Mary Wilfrid Your [phonetic]
and she used to take us to the Getty Museum every year and we would look at all the beautiful
antiquities and then she would take us to the beach in full Nun habit and we would sit
on the beach and eat a picnic, it was amazing. Nuns do swim in those habits. Okay, but why
I love Rome so much is I studied there as an undergraduate and I'm going to return to
this theme. And I also saw a movie called [foreign language] but it was not really that
movie that you know. You know the movie by Raiders of the Lost Ark. The first time I
ever saw it was in Italian and I didn't understand two-thirds of it but I thought that archeology
was cool and I love ancient monuments because when I walk through them it allows me to imagine
what was going on and that's really what I love doing with the students in my classes.
I like to imagine why the past matters nowadays. And I studied in Florence where I learned
about beautiful art and architecture and beautiful literature written in the Italian language
like Boccaccio's "Decameron" but most importantly, when I got back, I went to my classes at Stanford
and I met a women name Sabina McCormick who had come into class like this. She would swoop
in like this and her hair would be like this say, "Good morning." And the first day we
saw her in Byzantine History Class there were only five of us and we looked at each other
like what is this? She was a brand new professor and she came and lit a fire under all of us.
All five of us got a doctorate in ancient studies because of her. She spoke with this
amazing knowledge and she was really in many respects a salvation, a form of [foreign language]
for us because she showed us that the life of the mind matters. It matters so deeply
that you should have weird piles of books all over your house. And you should wake up
with a stack of books next to your bed and you should tape vocabulary lists of Quechua
on your bathroom mirror because you want to understand the Incas so badly that you will
learn their language even while you brush your teeth. That was Sabina McCormick. And
when I was studying in Ireland, I learned that she died and most miraculously, she died
in her garden. And she taught us that the garden, of course, is the place of paradise
in all sorts of literature most importantly, St. Augustine with whom I read the text with
Sabina in Latin because she would order giant books in Latin and say, "You know, look at
Chapter 5." And I'm like, "Oh my God." So that was Sabina. She was a genius but she
was extremely humane and she loved her students. And that's how I discovered that I love things
like reading Greek and I love reading it with a precision that however makes this gibberish
over here that is written the way I text messages on my telephone with no spaces, that you used
to be able to transcribe it and translate it and that's what I think is important that
we make things accessible and available to everybody. But it was Sabina who taught me
that what I should really look into is the existence of Jews in Ancient Rome in the First
Century A.D. and to look at an author, Josephus, who had really never been examined before
in my field of classics because he was Jewish. And she said you can do this dissertation
and lots of people said it is an inappropriate topic but I was so fascinated by the fact
that the Romans had conquered Jerusalem and all of the land of Judea and the north of
there as well. And they brought back all these objects to Rome which are depicted on the
Arch of Titus and then they built an amazing arena and a scholar discovered three years
before I finished my dissertation that that was built with the *** from the war. That
was built with Jewish money, the equivalent of the amount of money that it took to build
the Save Mart Center if you put the money into modern dollars. They took the temple
money of Jerusalem and built the greatest arena the world has ever seen. They also built
an extraordinary Temple of Peace ironically, named Peace because they thought it was peace
to conquer and basically, destroy places into submission and this author, Josephus, the
Jewish Historian whose text I read in great depth and whose text I will continue to read
in great depth in the future because I have to do another volume. He explains about this
temple in depth and I once saw a picture of this glass, it's the bottom of a drinking
glass that was smooched into a wall in a catacomb marking a grave and there's only one in existence,
though archeologist found two of them and what I realized is by looking at this and
mapping it to the archeologist's plan of the Temple of Peace, I was able to prove that
the objects from Jerusalem such as the Menorah and other Golden Vessels were still in Rome
in the 4th Century and that it was not a myth that the Vandals or the Goths and then the
Vandals had possession of those objects in late antiquity, the period that Sabina taught
me. All of this is the long way of saying to you guys, listen to your professor, sometimes
they tell you something really important and they can lead you down a path that you weren't
thinking of until they said it. And you take that ball and you run with it like these guys,
like the baseball players. You have to ask yourself, what would make you excited enough
to jump in a big dog pile like that, to raise a trophy like Derek Carr? You all have that
opportunity if you grab it, if you choose to be that excited about what you're doing.
You have to ask yourself what is your passion? Does this count? I love Fresno State ice cream.
Oh, my Lord. I'd argue if you make it. If you're in the college of Ag and you make that
stuff and you make these wonderful watermelon animals. I teach Greek in the building where
there is constant cooking going on and I want to go eat those cinnamon rolls instead of
teach Greek. We also have passionate artists on this campus like the creative writer Alex
Espinoza whose new novel the Five Acts of Diego Leon is coming out this April. You have
amazing artists to learn from on this campus. You have clubs you can join like this one
an Industrial Tech where you can look into new forms of energy with a club such as Robert
[inaudible] have done or you can get so involved in your studies of geology like Rachel up
here and Kirstie and Shelby, you can go out there and look at all the formations and give
them all those long Greek terms and love it and carry a large pack. And you can also have
fun like Shelby here, different Shelby. It must be the name for geologists. Shelby Fredrickson
is pointing you at California poppies because while you're looking for formations in Yosemite,
you should definitely stop and look at how gorgeous it is here. This is a beautiful place
and she's showing it to you, go see it. It's covered in snow right now unfortunately. Okay,
I put this in because I thought it was so funny. Her violin is on fire. She doesn't
go here by the way, she's a random pick off the web but she plays so darn well, her violin
explodes. I took piano for nine years, not great. And that's the thing. You know, truthfully,
I would have loved being a musician specifically, singing but I'm not a great singer, so what
I love is singing with Anna Hamre in the Chorale when I get a chance. I did it once. She is
the best director I've ever seen. I sang with the Symphonic Chorus at Stanford. She is amazing
and so are the other singers. We have a remarkable marching band and we have a remarkable orchestra.
All of these opportunities for exploring your art are available at Fresno State, moving
on next letter, more T-Shirts. A.
>> [Multiple speakers]
>> I heard it, it was [foreign language], achievement, front row. Sorry, you probably
said it back there. We should have gotten like 15 T-shirts. Aspiration is also great
and it's part of the UHS. Okay. This slide has too many words. These are my key pieces
of advice about classes and studying. You need to choose a major based on your passion
and your skills like Socrates said, "You've go to do what you do best and you've got to
love it." And so I may love music but I was not a born music major. You need to figure
out what you are best at and it was my mom who figured out the Latin. As a matter of
fact, my high school didn't offer Latin and she went to the principal and she said, "My
daughter's going to be a 9th grader, she needs to learn Latin." And as a joke they started
it. And the reason they let it continue was because Sister Mary Wilfrid Your who was this
tall, she was very short, she taught it in her spare time. She was retired and she taught
only two of us by our senior year and we just kept going. And that was how I figured out
that was my passion. The other thing was I actually visited my major advisor. I made
Sabina my major advisor by the way. She was not assigned to me. I was assigned to someone
in the Asian Languages originally. You need to find an advisor with whom you can communicate
in your field who will help you and even if they aren't your official advisor, find a
professor who inspires you, who when her or she talks, you say to yourself, my gosh I
wonder if I could be like that person. If you can find that person, talk to that person.
Also pick the right classes. Get some help every semester, don't do it in the dark and
very importantly, visit office hours because we do hold them once in a while and we do
like to help you because we want you to succeed. We also would really love it if you'd buy
or rent your books because it's very hard to succeed when you don't own the books. You
also are theoretically, spending 40 to 50 hours a week studying. That is a lot. And
somehow you should get eight hours of sleep at your age. And you aren't are you? Yeah.
And you need to celebrate your success. Celebrating your success can of course, be going out with
your family, having a nice dinner but I would also argue that if someone invites you to
an Honor Society in your field or a National Honor Society, join it, because these societies
stand for integrity like that banner says. They indicate that you're the kind of person
who really cares about higher learning and about integrity. One thing that all of you
can do, even if you think you aren't the person who can do it, you can. You need to look out
for research opportunities. They can come in the form of working in labs on campus,
helping a professor with a project. Ask a professor you respect, can I help you with
something? Can I go get some books for you? Anything to get your foot in the door. If
your field offers internship or service learning is available anywhere, do it, it will transform
your outlook. And if you can, construct a project. It's so funny because there were
no senior Honor's Projects or anything in my field when I was in undergraduate but because
I had this mentor Sabina, I went to her and I said, "What should I do?" And she said,
"Keep doing what you love doing" but wouldn't it be nice to have a conference? And she was
the one who seeded in my mind that we should throw a whole conference about late antiquity
and we invited two scholars from overseas and we raised all the money. It's what you've
guys have done. It's what the USU and student involvement have done. You create something
out of nothing because you get a good idea and it will inspire you. This is the kind
of thing that becomes the basis of your future success. And when you take advantage of the
research advantages and other opportunities on campus, you have opportunities here that
don't exist at large research universities because at those schools, they're so worried
about their graduate students and doctoral programs that often times they overlook the
undergraduates. Instead, here at Fresno State, you can get undergraduate research grants
from the Dean of Undergraduate Studies and you can consequently do a great deal with
that support and prepare yourself for either graduate school or for employment. And look
at what Dr. Gao has done in Physics. Since 2007, we are the only CSU Campus that has
students going to the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva,
Switzerland. This is the team, this whole group of scholars and there are many, many
hundreds of these scholars but here are Fresno State students involved in this. They were
one piece in the puzzle of discovering the higgs boson on Independence Day last year.
That's what you can do here. Those kinds of opportunities are here. Lucidito Delgado [assumed
spelling] was a student who was told in high school you can't be an honor student. And
she came to Fresno State and she found her passion was mass common journalism and because
she loved it so much she joined the Arts and Humanities Honors program and she created
motivite [phonetic] out of whole cloth as her project. And it was an amazing celebration
of the passion for success amongst Hispanic students. And she told the news, I feel that
every single person has the capacity to accomplish anything; it's just that you have to make
sacrifices and you have to do whatever it takes to get that done. No one can say it
better not even Socrates. And when you do it and much less boring too, when you do what
she says, you can find yourselves finding jobs because you love what you do and you
can go to graduate school as Lucidito plans to do. And Fresno State students have gone
to the best graduate programs in the country in many fields, not just a couple and that's
what all of you can aspire to. You have to do your best because he wasn't supposed to
win and in my mind winning is crossing the finish line and doing it with vim and vigor,
doing it like you mean it. C.
>> [Multiple speakers]
>> I heard it. I heard it. Yes, courage. All of those were good by the way. I'm not trying
to downplay your choices but courage, courage matters. All that passion and achievement,
it's not enough because what you have to do is test yourself and take a risk. You need
to do things that take you beyond your comfort zone. We normally think of courage as perhaps
a military value. It's something you display when you're on the battlefield or when you
tell your story as a Vet as the War Veterans Project here at Fresno State under Dr. Gary
Rice allows students to learn about. You have these opportunities of Fresno State to tap
into courage in that manner but there's so many other less celebrated ways such as taking
a harder course of study than you ever imagined like nursing which is beastly, joining an
organization like a Greek organization where it's really hard to get out of your shell
and show yourself to others and be their sister, that really takes guts. And look at Aldi,
oh my Lord, she's jumped out of an airplane. I don't recommend that but I saw it on Facebook
and so I took it. Please don't do that. Okay, the thing that's available to everyone is
study abroad. Study abroad allows you to leave the valley, to leave the United States and
go somewhere extraordinary. You can go on CSU International Programs. You can go on
USAC. We have a new arrangement with a campus in Rome. There are many semesters through
a variety of programs on campus and departmental programs as well. You can visit Family Food
Sciences 119 to learn more, department programs such as Armenian Studies. Look at all of them
in 2011. Okay. This is the CSU International program in Mexico. It's hard to believe they
study but I believe they do. There's Will in Prague the Czech Republic. There are students
doing archeology in Rome. You can do this through Fresno State now. There's Tristen
in Berlin in Germany. He studied there with the Craig School. And there's a mini-semester
with the College of Arts and Humanities that takes you to London and you can visit Stonehenge
as well. And you can be in the drizzly rain but that's what it's about in England, right?
You live with the people. You eat their food. You learn hopefully, their language if you're
there long enough and it transforms you. Do you like the globe by the way? If you don't
know where you want to go you can take the globe and go like this and you can end up
choosing North America which would be boring. Russia would not, Kazakhstan would not be
a good choice. I had a Greek student at Stanford many years ago who said to me, "I've always
wanted to see the Silkroute." And I said, "Okay Ben, go check it out when you graduate."
Bad idea, he went to the Silkroute but he ended up in Uzbekistan in jail and he broke
out of jail and stole a horse to get away, don't do that. I got a postcard about it,
don't do that. Do something good, good for other people. Look at Walid Hamud. He received
a Rotary International Scholarship, went to South Africa and helped set up this wonderful
or helped continue with the setting up of this wonderful home for children who live
on the streets. It was call Sinethemba and if you want to learn more you can contact
him through me about how you might help. There's Raven Kapphahn in Jordan. Raven comes from
the Central Valley. She is also a Renaissance Scholar and she earned an extremely prestigious
scholarship which is offered to those who might offer service to the United States government
when they're done. She would like to become and International Humanitarian. You can apply
to that program.
>> [Inaudible]
>> I'm going to give you a hint, Jan and Bud Richter Center. Yes. Good.
>> Eureka.
>> I like Eureka more. Okay. This is my pitch. You're all are here tonight because you care
enough about being in large places with others. You should join organizations, ASI. You can
represent your college or other entities on campus like these guys this year. You can
join the USU Board. You can get involved in setting up Vintage Days. You can be a Campus
Ambassador. You can do a lot on this campus, that's last year not this year, wrong dates.
River Tree, you can do a lot of environmental work on this campus. You can take Political
Science classes or you can simply join and go do it. You can do the work on the San Joaquin
that cleans tons of tires and other debris out of the river every year so that it flows
more easily, so that we have a beautiful river that will eventually become the correct habitat
again. And you can join [foreign language]. You can become a member of anything when you
check it out. So take advantage. There's a panoply opportunities on this campus. You
don't have to stay with the same club. You also should show school spirit. It's really
important. You should go support people who are playing amazing basketball right now.
Have you been to see them? They're incredible. That's another thing I would have loved to
do but I'm not good enough. I loved basketball in high school and I used to play with the
team when I was in undergrad on Sundays because that's when they would allow me to go and
play sort of like a bumper in the road. But these women are amazing. Go to their games,
check it out. The place is rather empty right now, it shouldn't be. And you should go to
the Farm Market because we have this amazing bounty and when the corn comes in the people
comes out of the woodwork, don't go then. But most importantly, you have a pantry right
off campus that needs your help every Friday and Saturday. They need help with packing
the bags of food, distributing the food, they need help with funding for it and you can
all participate in that. The Jan and Bud Richter Center has really helped promote this kind
of community service and she pledges to volunteer more, more often. And look at what ASI did
last winter when they put up that huge kaboom playground at El Dorado Park. That was amazing
and that's what all of you can participate in over the next couple of years that you're
here at Fresno State. We've contributed over a million hours a year which is pretty darn
remarkable. One of us, Daniel Ward has received a National Award from Campus Compact which
was an organization founded in 1985 in order to promote service on campuses where they
didn't see enough students participating and he received that National Award and he's there
with his brothers at the pantry on a Friday packing food. You can also, I'm almost begging
you, join the March for Babies on April 20th. We have teams set up for Fresno State. You
can start one in your department amongst your friends or in your clubs and we're going to
march up Woodward Park on April 20th. Why do this matter? Because this little girl right
here Mackenzie, was born really early and what the March of Dimes does is that it gives
money towards research to figure out why mothers give birth too early to prevent prematurity
which will in fact put a huge dent in infant mortality. And infant mortality is predominately
caused by prematurity in the United States and around the world. And therefore, if we
do this now we will make a difference possibly even in your own family. How many of you actually
stop and read the Peace Garden quotes? You see the statues you walk to class, you kind
of ignore them but these really are profound people obviously, such as Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. and Gandhi and Jane Addams and Cesar Chavez. All of them matter. Gandhi said, "The
best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." See Socrates said,
"You need to find yourself, figure out your skills." But what he's saying is that part
of this Gandhi is saying, "Is that you need to help others and when you help others, you're
going to become the best you, you're going to discover yourself." Interestingly, the
original motto of Fresno State, "Lucem Accipe Ut Reddas"receive the light so that you may
give back is really, really fitting for this campus in part because of the giving back.
The big picture though is what you're going to do with all of this because you don't stay
at Fresno State forever. You go to graduation hopefully, and then you have to figure out
what to do afterwards. And that's kind of scary but at the same time the world's your
oyster if you take advantage of all the opportunities now. If you figure out yourself now, not 10
years from now and believe me you're going to figure yourself out anyway 10 years from
now but you will get closer to being happier if you find your passion, if you achieve something
while you're here. Get much better at what you originally thought you could do. If you
show courage, if you don't just stay in a rut, if you actually step out of your comfort
zone and get yourself engaged in this community whether it's Fresno State or the rest of Fresno
itself. I was reading the Governor Brown's speech, the State of the State Address because
I read a blurb in the Fresno Bee and it sounded interesting but when I read the actual speech
I was astonished because it looked like the new motto of Fresno State, discovery, diversity,
distinction. It's almost as if he had read our motto because he says about the State
of California, this year Eureka State, this State of Discovery. What is this but the most
diverse, creative and longest standing mass migration in the history of the world? All
of us here tonight are part of that, that's California. The rest of the country looks
to us not for what's conventional but for what is necessary, necessary to keep faith
with our courageous forbearers. Whoever came here from somewhere else, it took a lot of
courage to leave home. All of us benefit from their courage. What we've done together and
what we must do in the coming years is big but it pales in comparison to the indomitable
courage of those who discovered and each decade thereafter built a more abundant California.
That's why you go to Fresno State. That's what we're here for. It's not just for you
so in a way, Socrates kind of disappoints because he keeps it within the bounds of Euthydemus
discovering himself. I would say that what you're doing here is bigger and if you keep
that passion and if you achieve things and if you show courage and you get engaged, you
can change things for the better. You can make California better which is why the State
invested in you in this education. And when you look at tonight, this was part of that
story of courage and obviously engagement because it's student involvement who set it
all up and I am very grateful to all of them who have suddenly run away but I'm very grateful
to you because what you've done is what other organizations have just talked about it. They've
talked about it, you did it. And I look forward to the future talks and I'm very grateful
for this opportunity. And I just wondered if anyone had any questions. Real fast I don't
want to prolong the evening. Does anyone have any questions or thoughts?
>> Thank you
>> Dr. Honora Chapman: That's enough.
[ Applause ]