My name is Charles Mercieca, and I happen to be the president of the international association of educators for world peace. I’m also a retired professor from Alabama A&M State University, where I taught for 34 years. Now, I am the global president of the Concordia International University, and in this position, I plan to promote a lot of branches of this university throughout the world. One of the unique characteristics of this university is that it is radically different from the average university in the world. The purpose of the average university, especially as I see it in the US, is to help the students to get a job: Studying to get a job and make money. Concordia University does not put emphasis on that element but on creating a better world, which is peaceful. In order to do that, you have to learn to do it. You can’t just say do it, and do it. We teach our students, as a result, that their purpose is to promote international understanding and world peace throughout their lifetime, to safeguard the environment from air and water pollution, to safeguard human rights, and to promote disarmament and development of the human resources for positive and constructive purposes. If all the students of the world would be trained to achieve these objectives, then once they leave the school, they are prepared to promote a genuine international peace because like the UNESCO preamble says, “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” And the purpose of Concordia International University is precisely to implement this preamble of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organizations, commonly known as UNESCO. Once we achieve that, we will have a permanent peace. We never have a permanent peace because we never seriously work on it. Now, the time has arrived where we have absolutely, with no other choice, to work on it very seriously. And Concordia International University has taken a gigantic step in this direction to promote this initiative so that eventually our children and their children will finally leave at peace, respecting each other.
First of all, today, I want to congratulate all the graduating students because this is going to be the beginning of a new life for them. I want to bring to the mind of each one of them that the graduation was not meant just to give them a job. The graduation was meant because they are certified now to have developed a kind of responsibility from Concordia International University that they could be trusted with the promotion of international understanding and world peace, that they can bring people together in harmony and prosperity. This is a very important element. And, of course, as I hinted earlier, the best way to communicate to people is to speak a language they understand. There is no need to know how to read, write and do so many things, but it is important that we talk the same language loud and clear, and it does not take much time to master this segment of a language, and, in fact, a language is always divided into three segments: reading, writing, and speaking. Of these three segments, the easiest is speaking. Why? Because when we speak, we choose our own vocabulary, we choose our own phraseology, and we choose everything we want and that we already know, whereas when it comes to reading, everything was chosen by other people for us, which we may know or may not know. When it comes to writing, when people present us with books or other elements, also, we have to read the expression that other people chose for us, and some of it we may know it or we may not know it. But when we choose our own words, when we choose our own expression, then everything we say is going to be loud and clear. And people will understand us. People will communicate with us. They will feel at home with us. As a result, the goals of international understanding, world peace, and mutual understanding will be achieved better and faster. That’s why we want to make sure that all of the graduating students will not take the study of foreign language just lightly but to take them seriously and to learn as many as they can afford.
