The Xavier Institute

[x-avier.livejournal.com]

,

I am pleased to be able to announce some rather momentous news for all of us here. As some of you may have noticed, there have been a great many visitors to the school over the past several weeks. These guests have been helping me finalize something that I have been working towards for quite some time now.

Many of you do a great deal of work in the world outside the school, something I have always watched with great pride. RedX, HeliX, Elpis, and the X-Men have all been ways to live out your beliefs regarding the place of mutants in society. What I hope this plan of mine will do is assist all of you who take part in such work, as well as provide additional opportunities to contribute to all who may have the inclination.

As of this year, I will be setting up an Institute, a foundation whose work will support initiatives designed to advance genetic integration within society at large. How it will achieve this is through the provision of scholarships and grants. You may apply for these grants to fund any initiative designed to improve understanding and harmony between mutants and non-mutant members of society.

I hope to see many of the organizations I mentioned above benefit from these grants, of course. But I also hope to see individual projects proposed, and will make this announcement the first of many times I encourage anyone with an idea to consider applying for funding and moving forward with it. We have such a range of gifted people among us, and it would be a great joy to help any of you find the opportunity to put those gifts to work for the betterment of all.

Many of the meetings I mentioned above have had specifically to do with a rather unique opportunity that the opening of the Institute will provide us. In addition to the grant program, as of this fall we will also be playing host to a new post-secondary collaborative program in Mutant Studies. I will be speaking to a number of our staff members whose academic backgrounds make them logical candidates to serve as staff for this program. It is of course open to any of you currently in the midst of your own studies who may wish to explore certain subjects from a mutant-oriented perspective. We hope to have final details settled by the end of this term, but please feel free to speak to me if you would like to explore this as an option for next year. Part of our arrangement will allow for students resident here to take courses that would otherwise not be offered via distance education - a sort of quid pro quo, if you like. Given that some of you have made commitments here that require your presence in New York, this may offer some new possibilities for you.

I will be available to answer any questions that you may have about any of this, of course, although we also hope to have the official literature ready very soon. I hope that the next few months will be exciting for all of us as we ponder these new opportunities.

As for myself, I know I can barely contain my anticipation to see what you all might dream up.