This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is a ribbon-cutting speech written for a university president. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published non-fiction writer. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
Thank you, Governor, trustees, faculty, students, staff, alumni, honored guests and friends:
One year ago, many of us were standing here on a lot bounded by the Schuykill Expressway and the old U.S. Post Office. Today we are standing at the crossroads of science and the humanities or, as we are calling it, the Dinesh G. Saha Center for Nanotechnology.
Look at what the love of humanity and knowledge has wrought!
The Saha Center is a tribute to a multi-disciplinary dream that began with Benjamin Franklin, our founder, 272 years ago. It bears the name of an Engineering alumnus and trustee who took Franklin’s love of commerce, public service and learning to heart when he founded Valtech International, a global energy company across the Delaware in Redstone.
As a newcomer to the U.S. in 1966, Dinesh Saha came to learn an essential lesson about boundaries between countries, classes and cultures: They are permeable.
His course of study at our university confirmed that lesson. It grounded him in the scientific method, but it also gave him entree to literature, history, economics and philosophy.
Dinesh came here on a scholarship. He has always seen himself as a product of the charity of others. His humility is in keeping with the whole concept of nanotechnology — a field of study that borrows from many other disciplines: medicine, electronics, biomaterials and energy production.
Nanotechnology itself is influencing the novels we read, the cities we live in, the medicine that extends our lives and the intellectual property coded inside the gadgets we love. It’s defining the way we work, the way we invest, even the way we vote. It’s affecting just about everybody in the advanced and developing worlds.
I suspect a lot of us came to our ceremony today by way of Center City and Thirtieth Street Station. The first building we saw on our campus was this glass and steel monument to our hopes for the twenty-first century. We are looking to the Saha Center to represent us as a leader in scientific research and education.
We are looking to the Saha Center to represent us as a partner with industry, government, NGOs and other academic organizations committed to bringing the benefits of modernity to a wider world.
A word about the building itself.
It is the brainchild of Horowitz/Milani, a New York City architectural firm that shares our multidisciplinary world view. Amy Horowitz and Michael Milani have opened the borders between architecture and art, and between engineering and urban planning to create a building that encourages conversation between faculty and students, researchers and industry, the University and its neighbors in West Philadelphia.
Horowitz/Milani has welded form and function together and designed the Saha Center with sustainability in mind. This building will use 30 percent less water than older buildings. It will use low-emitting paint and carpet materials. And 35 percent of total power will come from a registered green power supplier.
One final point. And that’s to say something has changed since we gathered on this plot of land one year ago. That something is life as we knew it.
We are living through the most financially uncertain time in our lives. Funding is scarce in all the disciplines that we as educators and public servants treasure. The Saha Center has come along at the right time to remind us that the U.S. needs universities to help restore this country to economic competitiveness. The Center comes along to remind us that here, in Philadelphia, where Ben Franklin turned his ideas about scientific education into the American Philosophical Society, and his ideas about freedom of thought into the lending library system, we have turned word into deed.
Thank you, Dinesh G. Saha, for lending your name to this extraordinary building. And thank you, honored guests, for believing in the power of education to bring the goodness of innovation to every corner of the world.
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Please note: All proper names have been changes to preserve the privacy of the university president and the institution.
