Dear Seattle University Community,
On this Thanksgiving Day, I would like to offer my gratitude to each of you for your contributions to the remarkable academic community to which we are all privileged to belong. I am grateful to our students for your boundless energy and optimism and for your thirst for the truth, which inspires and gives meaning to our daily work. I’m grateful to our faculty, staff and administrators, for your brilliance and skill, and for your unmatched dedication to our students and to their successful development into leaders for a just and humane world. I’m thankful for our Jesuit community, whose values inform everything we do and who remind us to search for the divine in the humblest people and places. I am grateful for the members of our community who have come before us, whose tireless efforts built Seattle University, over 130 years, into the institution that we are fortunate to steward.
I’m grateful for the rich diversity of our community, which challenges and enriches each of us to grow in understanding and empathy as we seek to create a university in which every one of us feels valued and at home. On this holiday, I give thanks for our Native communities, including the Coast Salish people on whose ancestral lands our campus is located and for whom so many of our local places (including our own university) are named. This holiday is often a painful reminder to them of injustices and their ongoing impacts.
Finally, this year, I give special thanks for the LGBTQ members of the Seattle University community, many of whom are experiencing grief and even fear over this Thanksgiving weekend in the wake of last weekend’s hateful violence in Colorado Springs. Let’s wrap them in our love and support and gratitude for the gift of their presence in our community. Let’s also give thanks for the heroism of those inside Club Q and, inspired by their courage, commit ourselves to combating hate and the scourge of gun violence in our own communities.
As we celebrate this Thanksgiving holiday, I hope you share in my sense of gratitude for our many blessings. I wish you a joy-filled weekend with family and loved ones. Travel safely, and I look forward to seeing you back on campus next week as we prepare to complete the work of the fall term.
Respectfully,
Eduardo M. Peñalver
President