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Chancellor Kent Syverud addressed the University Senate today, Feb. 15. The full text of his remarks is below.

Good afternoon. I’d like to give a couple of my minutes to Senior Vice President Allen Groves and DPS Chief Craig Stone for a reason I’ll give.

Monday night, like some of you, I was up late following the horrible events at Michigan State University. Of course, we learned that three promising, young students were killed and five others seriously injured. On behalf of all of us at ���ϲ�����, I have expressed condolences and offered support to our colleagues at Michigan State, as I did to our colleagues at Virginia last semester, and I have with dismal regularity done at other colleges and universities.

These are jarring and horrific events. It is hard to understand them. I know that when it happens on a college campus, it’s hard not to think “what if this happened at ���ϲ�����.” I know that thought has probably occurred to all of you multiple times.

I wish I could promise that an event like this will never happen here. I wish I could guarantee that we can take steps that will guarantee that it never happens here. Unfortunately, in the situation we’re in currently in this country, I can’t make those promises.

What I can say is that our university has been across the entire leadership aggressively preparing and training for these moments. Preventing these events, as best we can, is the highest goal. We do a lot of work on that. But we also prepare to react, respond and minimize the threat to our communities to keep it as safe as possible. It is easy to forget between the events, the steps and resources available. I thought given recent events, just two minutes from Allen [Groves] and Chief Stone reminding us of some of this might be appropriate.

I ask permission for Allen to speak.