Speaking to the students at one of the Sathya Sai Colleges which is now the Sri Sathya Sai University, Swami declared, "This college has not been established just to prepare you for earning degrees.
The main purpose is to help you to cultivate self-knowledge and self confidence, so that each one of you can learn self-sacrifice and earn self-realisation. Teaching the university curricula, preparing you for the examinations and earning degrees are only the means employed for the end, namely spiritual uplift, self-discovery and social service though Love, Detachment. Our hope is that by your lives, you will be shining examples of spiritual awareness and its beneficial consequences to the individual and society. This college is run on higher principles. Here the emphasis is on giving and forgiving, not on getting and forgetting those who gave you what you got. We also encourage service, especially between the illiterate and the needy in villages around. We try to highlight the responsibilities of youth rather than rights. The right is earned only by the proper discharge of the responsibility. When you shirk your duty, you have no rights to ask for your rights. Remember the years spent in this college are the most precious in your lives. If they are wasted in indifference or positive idleness, you will have to rue for it, all the rest of your lives. Being in this college is the highest piece of good fortune and if you do not rise up to our expectations through negligence or waywardness, the loss is irreparable. You will learn here the valuable lessons of detachment, loving service, fraternity, humility, sincerity, fortitude and fearlessness. Treasure them for they will serve as reliable props when you enter the world of action. In college you will be marching from smaller truths to bigger truths, until you are taught the know-how to reach the higher truth. I am depending on you students, for a great transformation in outlook, a great revolution.Students of the Sri Sathya Sai College must lead this movement. The older generation can only talk; it is you who must act. You have to prove yourselves worthy of this college. Be disciplined; be sweet in manners, in speech and in relations with the less fortunate. Be grateful to your parents, your villages and those who strive for your welfare. Try your best to earn a fair name for yourselves, for your college and for your parents. Do not be under the impression that you and I have come together only now since you study in this college; you have come to me for the sake of far higher triumphs; as a consequence of merits acquired during previous lives. You and your teachers are destined to achieve tremendous tasks under my guidance, in the execution of the mission for which I have come Source : http://www.sssu.edu.in/Home.htm Om Sai Ram
