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REMARKS FOR THE OPENING CEREMONY
7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF HACU

José Jaime Rivera, Ph.D.
Chair of the Governing Board, HACU
President, Sacred Heart University
May 4, 2007

Good afternoon. Royal Highness, Prince Felipe. As Chair of the Governing Board of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) and also on behalf of our Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Antonio Flores, it is my honor to welcome you and all participants here today, as well as to express our gratitude for your participation in these opening events of the 7th International Conference of our association.

Before I continue, I wish to express to you, to Her Highness Princess Letizia and to the rest of the Royal Family, our warm congratulations for the birth of your second daughter, the Infanta Doña Sofía, on behalf of the Hispanic universities and the countries represented by our association, on behalf of my wife Ivette and me personally.

I would also like to greet the distinguished Ambassadors and diplomatic representatives who accompany us, as well as all government authorities, the Hon. Bartolomé González Jiménez, and through him all the inhabitants of this historic city which receives us with great hospitality.

Please allow me to underscore the presence and the support we have received from Rector Virgilio Zapatero, whom we ask to convey our greetings to all the university community. We also wish to recognize the sponsors and the organizers of this conference and all HACU members who are present.

The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) is an association of higher education institutions created in 1986 and representing around 400 universities from the United Status and Puerto Rico. Together, they enroll more than two thirds of the Hispanic university population of the United States.

HACU represents more than 450 higher education institutions in the United Status, Puerto Rico, Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Our association is committed to the development of university educational opportunities for our Hispanic community.

The purpose of the association is to develop its affiliated institutions, to improve access and the quality of educational opportunities at the higher education level for Hispanic students in the United States and Puerto Rico; to respond to social needs through strategic alliances; to share resources and information and to establish cooperative linkages with universities in Hispanic countries so that we can preserve our common heritage and enhance the reach of our relations.

This is the first time that our association holds a conference outside the American continent and we are proud to have the presence of His Royal Highness and all of you. We are gathering here today under the theme “Hispanic Culture: Celebrating our Heritage.” And we could not have chosen a more appropriate site for this first encounter of our organization with our “motherland,” as we call Spain in Puerto Rico and in other Latin American countries.

I begin by recognizing how essentially magical it is to have organized this event in such an emblematic city – Alcalá de Henares, cradle of the immortal Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of the most representative work of our culture and our values – Don Quijote de la Mancha.

I also wish to emphasize how symbolic the place where we are is – the University of Alcalá – founded by Cardinal Cisneros, Primate of Spain, in the year of 1499, only months after Christopher Columbus’ third voyage. With these voyages a new Empire was born after discovering and beginning the colonization of the so-called “new world.” This distinguished house of study [so called by a perennial Puerto Rican rector, Mr. Jaime Benítez] would be the renaissance, humanist and universal university of a recently unified and new world power upon which for some period of history the sun never set.

It is John, Chapter I, verse 1, who tells us “in the beginning was the Word” and when in the New World the Word was heard coming from the “old world” the sound of that word was Spanish. We learned from another great humanist, Miguel de Unamuno, that language is the blood of the spirit. And it is this marvelous language, rich and in constant evolution – our Spanish language – that makes us Hispanic. We share a language, and along with it, we share a culture and a set of profound and transcendent values.

As a symbol of this love of my land for the Spanish language and of the meaning of Spain in our history, I want, Your Highness, to give you a historic photograph of the development of what is today Sacred Heart University in Puerto Rico. This photograph preserves the solemn moment when the first stone was set for the construction of the first building of the second campus of our institution. The first campus, built under the Spanish regime in 1882, had been expropriated from the institution by the military authorities of the United States. But in this photograph of the ceremony held in 1906, in the central axis of the photo, one can appreciate the red and yellow flag, recognizing our heritage and our values which we, the Hispanic universities, continue to share with Spain.

May this rich and profound heritage and this mother language which unites us increasingly strengthen our linkages of cooperation and ongoing encounters among our nations and our universities.

Thank you very much.