Each year a university has the privilege to acknowledge moments of great significance.
Annually, on a sunny day in May, 5,000 students graduate, and the university sends them forth amidst noble rhetoric and exalted purpose.
Almost every month we dedicate new buildings, or acknowledge gifts that enable the institution to serve humanity. One day it is a new laboratory, another day it is a powerful new imaging installation that discovers hidden tumors.
We are also privileged to have a steady stream of distinguished visitors, ranging from foreign presidents to Cabinet officials to visiting scholars, all of whom grace our campus and challenge our thinking.
But it is rare indeed to have a visitor of the importance that we have tonight, a writer whose work demands respect not just because of its profound significance, but also because it has been created with great courage, in the very face of specific threats to the author's life.
Salman Rushdie is, quite simply, the most famous writer in the world. His work does nothing less than try to explain East to West and West to East. If globalization is our condition, then Rushdie is the poet laureate of the globe's immigrants.
As he describes himself, he is an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two others: England and Pakistan. He has lived in New York frequently and for increasingly longer stays.
He understands how the world's citizens try to make sense of one another. The diversity of his birthplace endows him with prophecy for a 21st Century trying to accommodate the tense differences between us. He saw, earlier than most of us that, "the defining struggle of the new age will be between terrorism and extremism." He is especially equipped to elucidate that struggle.
In his novels, in his journalism, in his criticism he offers us a vision of the universe with arms open wide enough to gather us all in, if only we will act on our most noble of human instincts. The world he posits includes rather than excludes, and the lessons of his homeland offer truths for the world at large.
As he writes of India in Imaginary Homelands: "For a nation of 700 million to make any kind of sense, it must base itself firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance, of devotion and decentralization wherever possible. There can only be one way – religious, cultural or linguistic – of being Indian. That way is let difference reign."
It is this celebration of difference that offers us a way for the 21st Century. It helps us focus on the important things. As Rushdie has put it: "We must agree on what matters – kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love."
Let us agree on what matters. Salman Rushdie matters. He helps us identify the important things. We are greatly honored to have him in Lawrence, Kansas.
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