I have just returned from several extraordinary days on the Normandy coast in France where I was privileged to revisit the allied beaches of D-Day, and especially the American sector zone, code-named Utah and Omaha. I was humbled to bear witness to our dead servicemen in the hauntingly serene American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. It was one of those experiences one never forgets. Stunning in its beauty, it is also emotionally wrenching. The cemetery itself is magnificently situated. It commands a high bluff overlooking the English Channel. Seagulls whirl, but down on earth, amidst the rows upon rows upon rows of identical tombstones, there is a profound silence, as if all nature has paused in tribute.

I fully recognize that Operation "Overlord," the invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, seems very distant from your present reality, but I resolved then to talk about that majestic scene with you today, because I could do no less and still honor the memory of those who died during those awful days of 1944. 200,000 soldiers went ashore on those beaches and American losses in Normandy were 27,000, a number equal to the entire student body of our University. 9,385 are buried on that remarkable promontory with a memorial for an additional 1,557 soldiers, whose bodies were never found. The youngest at 17, was born at about the same time this University was founded in 1926. The oldest, General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery at Normandy, was born in Oyster Bay Cove a year after our Brooklyn College of Pharmacy was established in 1886. Some of these men (and virtually all of them are men) are from your great grandparent's generation. Americans from a now distant age and most certainly a very different nation. And if you know anything of what happened during those dreadful days, it is likely through a Ken Burns documentary, blockbuster movies, like "The Longest Day," or Tom Hank's "Saving Private Ryan," Tom Brokaw's book "The Greatest Generation," or a history course taken along your educational way.

Chiseled on the main Memorial are these words: "To these we owe the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live." This is why I felt compelled to bring back the urgency of D-Day. Those fallen soldiers all shared one common fate: they died with their ambitions unfulfilled and their lives but partially lived. Their message is captured in the Latin phrase Carpe Diem, "seize the day."

Universities are affirmations of life. They speak to new opportunity, to the optimism of a new generation, to the world of the future, even while studying the past and preserving its cultures. Every one of you has the opportunity to quest for and to discover knowledge, to receive and give love, to seek beauty, and to find myriad types of fulfillment, including familial, financial and professional. And the whisper from those graves in France commands each of you to do no less.

The world you now enter is a complex and a scary place. It was certainly the same during World War II. All of us here – your parents and family, your spouses and friends, and the entire University community of faculty and staff collectively – all of us pray that each of you can and will find your own way superbly. As I stood on that promontory and as I listened closely to the sound of those winds swirling off the English Channel, I thought I heard from afar the cadence of those fallen soldiers, people then your age now, chanting this compelling message to each of you.

As that post-modern, galactic sage, Yoda, subsequently put it: "Trying there is not…Doing it is and not. May the force be with you."