• To view the webcast of the President's Convocation, visit iLMU and go to the Featured Webcasts section.

President Robert B. Lawton, S.J. addressed the campus community on Thursday, Oct. 15, in an honored university tradition that marks the beginning of the academic year. "The William H. Hannon Library: What Is It Saying to Us?" was the topic of this year's President's Convocation address.

Lawton first acknowledged the Bill Hannon Foundation, the William H. Hannon Foundation, the University Hill Foundation, the Jesuit Community and the numerous donors who made the William H. Hannon Library possible, as well as the many others who worked tirelessly to prepare for its grand opening on August 31.

“The William H. Hannon Library calls the university to greater aspirations, ambitions and ultimately achievements in the academic world,” Lawton said. “It encapsulates all the ways of human knowing,” he continued, explaining how past and present come together in the new library.

“There are old and rare books and the most modern technology; there are places for silence and places for conversation; and places like study rooms and a coffee shop that actually invite conversation," he said. "In this building, there are rooms and places for all our ways of learning and knowing."

The library could be described as “house of chance,” Lawton explained. “We go there with a particular purposes, our minds fixed on certain things, but surprising things happen. Ideas enter our mind … and they lead us in many different directions.”

Lawton said the library structure itself is contribution to the architecture of the city, but said the ultimate contribution would come from the students who look out its windows, beyond the bluff. “There will be thoughts of the city; of the world beyond the mountains and across the ocean; of the world and one’s place in it, and that question of ‘what am I going to do to care for the world?'

“The library is a house of chance and a house of dreams,” he said.