[President Vaccarino speaking to the camera in his home office]

“Welcome, everyone, and I hope you are all doing well during this tough time that we are all going through together.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to first of all give you all a shout-out for your amazing work; our faculty, our students, our staff are just working all out and doing everything they can to create what I sometimes refer to as a smooth transition.

Now this is a particularly tough one and your resiliency, your thoughtfulness and the efforts that everybody is putting in to help out and support each another is something I will always remember.

These are really, really difficult times and a big part of that is the stressfulness of these times. You know in many ways stress is characterized by change.

Whether we are going from a good place to not-so-good place or whether we are transitioning from a not-so-good place to a good place, it’s the change and the adaptation that is required for that change that is a challenge for all of us and is in many ways what defines stress.

And, I have to tell you, that everything I have seen in the last few weeks as we have come together to support each other and to work through this really, really intense time we are going through has been just a huge huge point of pride for me.

And I just want to say thank you for all that you are doing and I want to thank you for, as I said, your resiliency, your thoughtfulness, your patience through all of this.

And I also want to take a moment to recognize the people that I work closely with on a day-by-day basis.

You should all know that we’re all out, working at full-bore during these times, very long days and I want to recognize that team and my team for all of the terrific work that they are doing and for hanging in there as well.

So, on that note thank you to everyone, thank you for all you are doing. Stay well, stay safe and stay healthy. All the very best.”