Dr. Zenner, Chairman, Board of Trustees of Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Susan Adams and the members of your wonderful family,
To your larger family, the Fairleigh Dickinson community,

I am profoundly honoured to share in this service.

I travel to universities around the world and urge students to look beyond their immediate surroundings.

My message is simple: Be a global citizen.

No one embodied that call more than Dr. Michael Adams.

He did not just say it or teach it. He lived it.

He lived it through his ideas and his action.

He lived the words of St. Francis, which we have just heard.

Where there was doubt – in the power of education or the possibility of the United Nations – he brought faith.

Where so many clamoured only to be understood – he sought to understand.

In a world where so many strive only to acquire – he recognised that it is in giving that we receive.

And in his brief, but very full, 64 years, he gave and gave and gave.

And with each gift, the world gained.

Dr. Adams was quite simply one of the best friends the United Nations has ever had.

And he worked day and night to strengthen our bonds.

Thanks to him, Fairleigh Dickinson was the first university in the world to win special consultative status in the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

He developed courses for newly arrived diplomats – and global conferences on issues out of the media spotlight.

He launched the “Pathways” conversations programme bringing UN Ambassadors and senior officials to campus.

He revitalized the UN’s work with the University Presidents on disarmament, peace and conflict resolution.

And he was the driving force behind our efforts to more deeply engage universities around the world through what we call the Academic Impact initiative.

The United Nations put forward the idea at a meeting of the International Association of University Presidents in 2005.

Michael immediately saw the potential. He summoned creative minds. He made it happen.

When the time came to formally launch our proposal, I knew there was only one place to do it. Right here. So I came to Fairleigh Dickinson in 2008.

What began as a noble idea four years ago is today a global program with more than 850 universities in 117 countries.

We might call it Academic Impact. But I call its success the Adams’ Impact.

Michael believed in the power of individuals to make a difference.

That’s what he did. He was a man from a family that never had a college graduate and rose to become the President of the International Association of University Presidents.

He saw that same sense of potential in us all.

He did not see a planet of seven billion people – he saw a planet of seven billion possible solutions.

When I last met him some months ago, he spoke of the many friends he had in my country of South Korea.
He talked warmly, and in detail, of each.

I wondered whether he did, in fact, know more Koreans than I did!

That is just what the Trustees of Fairleigh Dickinson University meant when they spoke of Michael’s unique ability to make everything personal.

I like to believe he drew that ability, in some measure, from the premise of the document he so cherished and believed in, The Charter of the United Nations, and its faith in the “dignity and worth of the human person.”

It was a dignity and worth he so effortlessly nurtured among all he knew and the many more for whom he cared.

For all of that, I am honoured to be here on behalf of the United Nations to say:

Thank you, Michael.