NOTE: The following remarks were offered at the opening of SFSU's National Sexuality Resource Center held Feb. 20, 2003

With its multi-faceted mission of national service, and its focus on a subject that ranges across disciplines, populations and social issues, touching both public policy and private lives, the National Sexuality Resource Center will mirror virtually all that a university can do. The Center will educate; seek new knowledge; apply its expertise to critical social issues; bring potential partners together; stimulate discussion; empower individuals, groups, and whole communities; serve as a forthright and trusted source of information, and act as a spur to better public policy.

The Center is about equal access to knowledge, about diversity, about community engagement, about equity, about positive social change and about bringing potentially life-changing academic research to the people whose lives it can touch. Like our Human Sexuality Studies program itself, the Center expresses our University’s key values, and we are both proud and eager to take on the enormous public responsibility the Center represents.

With its major, five-year grant, the Ford Foundation has expressed its great trust in us. I thank you for that trust, and I can pledge with confidence that we will repay it many times over. We are the right university for this enterprise. We have the right people, and this is the right -- the necessary -- time for such a center.

Many of you know San Francisco State today as a national leader in sexuality studies. You may not realize, however, that our leadership goes back decades. In the early 1970s, we were one of the first universities in the nation to develop an academically-serious, credit-bearing course in human sexuality. Such a class was so uncommon that it caused something of a public uproar and brought national media to our door.

Some years later, we became higher education leaders in AIDS education and prevention. From an ahead-of-its-time conference in the mid- 80s, we developed a comprehensive, campus-wide AIDS effort, which continues to this day and has become a national model.

That original human sexuality class is still being taught, only now it is surrounded by a rich, interdisciplinary curriculum that draws faculty from seven of our eight colleges and offers both an undergraduate minor and a master’s degree -- one of very few in the nation. Human Sexuality Studies is now a firmly rooted, dynamic and intellectually exciting program at San Francisco State, with a constantly expanding circle of campus, community and national partners.

As this brief history suggests, San Francisco State brings to the National Sexuality Resource Center a powerful combination of scholarly expertise and public outreach, dedication to knowledge and equal dedication to seeing that it is usefully applied. Most critical of all, the University brings proven, effective leadership, starting with Gil Herdt and including many, many others. And as you see with the new Web site, we are off to a fast, strong start.

One of our great, good partners in the years ahead will surely be the man I am about to introduce.

Dr. David Satcher is known to all of us as the 16th Surgeon General of the United States. He held that post from 1998 to 2002, and for almost three of those years, he also served as Assistant Secretary for Health -- becoming only the second person in U.S. history to hold both positions simultaneously.

I believe it will not be long, however, before we identify Dr. Satcher with a new enterprise. Last September, he became the founding director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The only center of its kind in the nation, its mission is ambitious and urgent: to improve the quality of health care and health care access for minorities and the poor. This continues one of Dr. Satcher’s major efforts while he was Surgeon General and Assistant Secretary: eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. This initiative was incorporated into one of the two major goals of “Healthy People 2010,” the nation’s health agenda for the next 10 years.

Before becoming the country’s top health official, Dr. Satcher served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and as administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. His dedicated career in public health and minority education also includes an 11-year term as president of Meharry Medical College; and faculty posts at the UCLA School of Medicine and Public Health, the King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles (where he developed and chaired the department of Family Medicine), and Morehouse School of Medicine. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College and received both an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University.

A former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and Macy Faculty Fellow, Dr. Satcher is the recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees and many honors, among them the Nickens Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges for “outstanding contributions to promote justice in medical education and health care,” and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Award for Humanitarian Contributions to the Health of Humankind.

Shortly after his confirmation as Surgeon General, Dr. Satcher answered a reporter’s question by saying that he would most like to be known as the Surgeon General who listened to the American people and responded with effective programs. He continues to live by those words.

It is my honor now to present our keynote speaker, Dr. David Satcher.