    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [March 1, 1993]
    [Pages 224-229]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on National Service at Rutgers University in New Brunswick
    March 1, 1993

        Thank you, Nakia Tomlinson, for that fine introduction. I wish I
    could take you with me everywhere. We'd make a great duo there. Let's
    give her another hand. I thought she was great. [Applause]
        I'd like to thank President Frank Lawrence--Francis Lawrence--for
    his fine speech. Does anybody call him Frank? I should have asked.
    [Laughter] I want to compliment Professor Benjamin Barber for his
    leadership and service here. And I want to thank all of you here in the
    Rutgers community for coming out for what I hope will be a truly
    historic moment in our Nation's history.
        In addition to the people who have been introduced here, there are a
    host of mayors and members of the assembly and county officials here
    from your State. We have two former Governors, both of whom I served
    with, Brendan Byrne and Tom Kean, who are out there. I'm glad to see
    them, my friends. We have a distinguished array of Members of the House
    from New Jersey, Herb Klein, Bob Menendez, Frank Pallone, Donald Payne.
        But you have some Members of the Congress from all over America
    here, and I want to introduce them, too, because they have taken a lot
    of trouble to come to Rutgers and because without them and without the
    people who represent you, the proposal I make today has no hope of
    passage. Many Members of the Congress for years have believed we ought
    to do more in national service, and some of them are here today.
        I'd like to begin by introducing your Senator, Bill Bradley, who's
    behind me. I must say, when I walked into this arena, I turned around
    and asked Bill Bradley if he'd ever shot any baskets in here. I'd be
    intimidated to be the opposing team in here. Senator Bradley sponsored
    legislation to establish neighborhood corps and self-reliance
    scholarships, things that are forebears of the proposal I came to make.
        I'd like to recognize the presence on the platform of Senator Ted
    Kennedy from Massachusetts who chairs the Senate Committee on Human
    Resources and Education, which shepherded the pilot national and
    community service bill through the Congress in the last session, along
    with his counterpart who is out here in the audience somewhere. I'd like
    to ask him to stand up, the chairman of the House committee, Congressman
    Bill Ford, who came all the way from Michigan to be with us.
    Congressman, would you stand up.
        I'd like to recognize in the audience the presence of Senator Chris
    Dodd from Connecticut, who was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers
    in the United States.
        The Member of Congress who introduced many, many years ago the first
    piece of national service legislation ever introduced, the chairman of
    the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Claiborne Pell from Rhode
    Island is here.
        I'd also like to introduce the only person in this audience, at
    least of our crowd, who doesn't have to look up to Senator Bradley,
    Senator Jay Rockefeller from West Virginia, an early VISTA volunteer in
    the United States.
        And finally, I would like to recognize two other people, one a
    Member of the United States Senate and one a distinguished American
    citizen, the first boss of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver, who's up
    here with me, and his deputy, Senator Harris Wofford, from Pennsylvania,
    and Mrs. Wofford, I'm glad to see you.
        Now, I was involved before I became President in a group called the
    Democratic Leadership Council, and we made one of the central parts of
    our platform to reclaim a new majority

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    of Americans for our party the establishment of a system of national
    service to help people to finance education. And one of our founding
    members and guiding lights is here, Representative Dave McCurdy from
    Oklahoma. I'd like for him to stand up.
        Let me make this last point, if I might, by way of beginning. None
    of these things happen at the national level. We empower them to happen,
    and then people have to do things here at the grassroots. And I want to
    say a special word of thanks to your Governor for supporting the New
    Jersey Youth Corps and several other projects like it around the State,
    because if nobody's here to believe in this, it can't happen. And I
    thank Governor Florio for his support for these things.
        I came here to ask all of you to join me in a great national
    adventure, for in the next few weeks I will ask the United States
    Congress to join me in creating a new system of voluntary national
    service, something that I believe in the next few years will change
    America forever and for the better.
        My parents' generation won new dignity working their way out of the
    Great Depression through programs that provided them the opportunity to
    serve and to survive. Brave men and women in my own generation waged and
    won peaceful revolutions here at home for civil rights and human rights
    and began service around the world in the Peace Corps and here at home
    in VISTA.
        Now, Americans of every generation face profound challenges in
    meeting the needs that have been neglected for too long in this country,
    from city streets plagued by crime and drugs, to classrooms where girls
    and boys must learn the skills they need for tomorrow, to hospital wards
    where patients need more care. All across America we have problems that
    demand our common attention.
        For those who answer the call and meet these challenges, I propose
    that our country honor your service with new opportunities for
    education. National service will be America at its best, building
    community, offering opportunity, and rewarding responsibility. National
    service is a challenge for Americans from every background and walk of
    life, and it values something far more than money. National service is
    nothing less than the American way to change America.
        It is rooted in the concept of community: the simple idea that none
    of us on our own will ever have as much to cherish about our own lives
    if we are out here all alone as we will if we work together; that
    somehow a society really is an organism in which the whole can be
    greater than the sum of its parts, and every one of us, no matter how
    many privileges with which we are born, can still be enriched by the
    contributions of the least of us; and that we will never fulfill our
    individual capacities until, as Americans, we can all be what God meant
    for us to be.
        If that is so, if that is true, my fellow Americans, and if you
    believe it, it must therefore follow that each of us has an obligation
    to serve. For it is perfectly clear that all of us cannot be what we
    ought to be until those of us who can help others, and that is nearly
    all of us, are doing something to help others live up to their
    potential.
        The concept of community and the idea of service are as old as our
    history. They began the moment America was literally invented. Thomas
    Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, ``With a firm
    reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to
    each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor.''
        In the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln signed into law two
    visionary programs that helped our people come together again and build
    America up. The Morrill Act helped States create new land grant
    colleges. This is a land grant university. The university in my home
    State was the first land grant college west of the Mississippi River. In
    these places, young people learn to make American agriculture and
    industry the best in the world. The legacy of the Morrill Act is not
    only our great colleges and universities like Rutgers but the American
    tradition that merit and not money should give people a chance for a
    higher education.
        Mr. Lincoln also signed the Homestead Act that offered 100 acres of
    land for families who had the courage to settle the frontier and farm
    the wilderness. Its legacy is a nation that stretches from coast to
    coast. Now we must create a new legacy that gives a new generation of
    Americans the right and the power to explore the frontiers of science
    and technology and space. The frontiers of the limitations of our
    knowledge must be pushed back so that we can do what we need to do. And
    education is the way to do it, just as surely as it was more than 100
    years ago.

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        Seven decades after the Civil War, in the midst of the Great
    Depression, President Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps,
    which gave 2\1/2\ million young people the opportunity to support
    themselves while working in disaster relief and maintaining forests,
    beaches, rivers, and parks. Its legacy is not only the restoration of
    our natural environment but the restoration of our national spirit.
    Along with the Works Products Administration, the WPA, the Civilian
    Conservation Corps symbolized Government's effort to provide a nation in
    depression with the opportunity to work, to build the American community
    through service. And all over America today you can see projects, even
    today in the 1990's, built by your parents or your grandparents with the
    WPA plaque on it, the CCC plaque on it, the idea that people should be
    asked to serve and rewarded for doing it.
        In the midst of World War II, President Roosevelt proposed the GI
    bill of rights, which offered returning veterans the opportunity for
    education in respect to their service to our country in the war. Thanks
    to the GI bill, which became a living reality in President Truman's
    time, more than 8 million veterans got advanced education. And half a
    century later, the enduring legacy of the GI bill is the strongest
    economy in the world and the broadest, biggest middle class that any
    nation has ever enjoyed.
        For many in my own generation, the summons to citizenship and
    service came on this day 32 years ago, when President Kennedy created
    the Peace Corps. With Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford and other
    dedicated Americans, he enabled thousands of young men and women to
    serve on the leading edge of the new frontier, helping people all over
    the world to become what they ought to be, and bringing them the message
    by their very lives that America was a great country that stood for good
    values and human progress. At its height, the Peace Corps enrolled
    16,000 young men and women. Its legacy is not simply good will and good
    works in countries all across the globe but a profound and lasting
    change in the way Americans think about their own country and the world.
        Shortly after the Peace Corps, Congress, under President Johnson,
    created the Volunteers In Service To America. Senator Jay Rockefeller,
    whom I introduced a moment ago, and many thousands of other Americans
    went to the hills and hollows of poor places, like West Virginia and
    Arkansas and Mississippi, to lift up Americans through their service.
        The lesson of our whole history is that honoring service and
    rewarding responsibility is the best investment America can make. And I
    have seen it today. Across this great land, through the Los Angeles
    Conservation Corps, which took the children who lived in the
    neighborhoods where the riots occurred and gave them a chance to get out
    into nature and to clean up their own neighborhoods and to lift
    themselves and their friends in the effort; in Boston with the City Year
    program; with all these programs represented here in this room today,
    the spirit of service is sweeping this country and giving us a chance to
    put the quilt of America together in a way that makes a strength out of
    diversity, that lifts us up out of our problems, and that keeps our
    people looking toward a better and brighter future.
        National service recognizes a simple but powerful truth, that we
    make progress not by governmental action alone, but we do best when the
    people and their Government work at the grassroots in genuine
    partnership. The idea of national service permeates many other aspects
    of the programs I have sought to bring to America. The economic plan
    that I announced to Congress, for example, will offer every child the
    chance for a healthy start through immunization and basic health care
    and a head start. But still it depends on parents doing the best they
    can as parents and children making the most of their opportunities.
        The plan can help to rebuild our cities and our small communities
    through physical investments that will put people to work. But Americans
    still must work to restore the social fabric that has been torn in too
    many communities. Unless people know we can work together in our
    schools, in our offices, in our factories, unless they believe we can
    walk the streets safely together, and unless we do that together,
    governmental action alone is doomed to fail.
        The national service plan I propose will be built on the same
    principles as the old GI bill. When people give something of invaluable
    merit to their country, they ought to be rewarded with the opportunity
    to further their education. National service will challenge our people
    to do the work that should and indeed must be done and cannot be done
    unless the American people voluntarily give themselves up to that work.
    It will invest in the future of every person who serves.

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        As we rekindle the spirit of national service, I know it won't
    disappoint many of the students here to know that we also have to reform
    the whole system of student loans. We should begin by making it easier
    for young people to pay back their student loans and enabling them to
    hold jobs that may accomplish much but pay little.
        Today, when students borrow money for an education, the repayment
    plan they make is based largely on how much they have to repay, without
    regard to what the jobs they take themselves pay. It is a powerful
    incentive, therefore, for young college graduates to do just the reverse
    of what we might want them to do, to take a job that pays more even if
    it is less rewarding because that is the job that will make the
    repayment of the loans possible. It is also, unfortunately, a powerful
    incentive for some not to make the payments at all, which is
    unforgivable.
        So what we seek to do is to enable the American students to borrow
    the money they need for college and pay it back as a small percentage of
    their own income over time. This is especially important after a decade
    in which the cost of a college education has gone up even more rapidly
    than the cost of health care, making a major contribution to one of the
    more disturbing statistics in America today, which is that the college
    dropout rate in this country is now 2\1/2\ times the high school dropout
    rate. We can do better than that through national service and adequate
    financing.
        The present system is unacceptable, not only for students but for
    the taxpayers as well. It's complicated, and it's expensive. It costs
    the taxpayers of our country about $4 billion every year to finance the
    student loan program because of loan defaults and the cost of
    administering the program. And I believe we can do better.
        Beyond reforming this system for financing higher education, the
    national service program more importantly will create new opportunities
    for Americans to work off outstanding loans or to build up credits for
    future education and training opportunities.
        We'll ask young people all across this country, and some who aren't
    so young who want to further their college education, to serve in our
    schools as teachers or tutors in reading and mathematics. We'll ask you
    to help our police forces across the Nation, training members for a new
    police corps that will walk beats and work with neighborhoods and build
    the kind of community ties that will prevent crime from happening in the
    first place so that our police officers won't have to spend all their
    time chasing criminals.
        We'll ask young people to work, to help control pollution and
    recycle waste, to paint darkened buildings and clean up neighborhoods,
    to work with senior citizens and combat homelessness and help children
    in trouble get out of it and build a better life.
        And these are just a few of the things that you will be able to do,
    for most of the decisions about what you can do will be made by people
    like those in this room, people who run the programs represented by all
    of those wearing these different kinds of tee-shirts. We don't seek a
    national bureaucracy. I have spoken often about how we need to reinvent
    the Government to make it more efficient and less bureaucratic, to make
    it more responsive to people at the grassroots level, and I want
    national service to do just that. I want it to empower young people and
    their communities, not to empower yet another Government bureaucracy in
    Washington. This is going to be your programs at your levels with your
    people.
        And as you well know, that's what's happening all across America
    today. People are already serving their neighbors in their
    neighborhoods. Just this morning, I was inspired to see and to speak
    with students from Rutgers serving their community, from mentoring young
    people as Big Sisters to helping older people learn new skills. I met a
    lady today who has 13 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren who
    dropped out of school the year before I was born, who's about to become
    a high school graduate shortly because of the efforts of this program.
    You back there? Stand up.
        I'm impressed by the spirit behind the Rutgers Civic Education and
    Community Service Program, the understanding that community service
    enriches education, that students should not only take the lessons they
    learn in class out into the community but bring the lessons they learn
    in the community back into the classroom. In that spirit, during this
    academic year alone, more than 800 students from Rutgers are
    contributing more than 60,000 hours of community service in New
    Brunswick, in Camden, in Newark, throughout this State.
        This morning I also met with members of

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    the New Jersey Youth Corps--here they are; see them? Stand up--young
    people who are looking for a second chance at school and who, when
    coming back to finish their high school degrees, also serve in their
    communities. Through this program, more than 6,500 young adults have
    contributed over 900,000 hours of service to the State of New Jersey.
    They've done everything from paint senior citizens' homes to tutor and
    mentor children in after-school programs. For the future of our State
    and Nation, we need more young people like those in the New Jersey Youth
    Corps who exemplify the spirit of service.
        That spirit also moves people all across the Nation. In my State,
    there's a young woman named Antoinette Jackson, who's a senior in a
    small community called Gould, Arkansas. She's a member of the Delta
    Service Corps. The rural Mississippi Delta is still the poorest place in
    America. And in that area, she works with a ``lend-a-hand'' program
    which runs a thrift shop to provide hungry and homeless people with food
    and clothing. And in return, the Delta Corps is going to help her attend
    college so that she can make an even greater contribution.
        The spirit of service also moves a young man I met about a year ago
    named Stephen Spalos, who works with the City Year program in Boston. At
    age 23, he's had some hard times in his life. But as he puts it, City
    Year gave him a place and the tools to be able to start over. He works
    as a team leader, a mentor, a tutor, a project manager for a bunch of
    young people who restore senior citizens' homes. Last year when I
    visited his project, he literally took his sweatshirt off his back and
    gave it to me so that I would never forget the kids at City Year. And I
    still wear it when I go jogging, always remembering what they're doing
    in Boston to help those kids.
        The spirit of service moves Orah Fireman, a graduate of Wesleyan
    College. As a sophomore in high school, she worked with disadvantaged
    children in upstate New York. That experience changed her life. And
    during her high school and college years, she continued to work with
    children. And now that she is out of college, she has begun what will
    probably be a lifetime of service by working at a school for emotionally
    disturbed children in Boston. She wants other people to have the
    opportunity to serve, and she wrote this: ``Service work teaches
    responsibility and compassion. It fights alienation by proving to young
    people that they can make a difference. There is no lesson more
    important than that.''
        Well, there are stories like this in this room and all across
    America. And we're going to create thousands of more of them through
    national service. We'll work with groups with proven track records to
    serve their community, giving them the support they need. And if you
    have more good ideas, if you're entrepreneurs of national service, we'll
    let you compete for our form of venture capital, to develop new programs
    to serve your neighbors. That's how we want the national service program
    to grow every year, rewarding results, building on success, and bubbling
    up from the grassroots energy and compassion and intellect of America.
        I don't want service to wait while this potential is wasted. That's
    why I want to make this summer a summer of service when young people can
    not only serve their communities but build a foundation for a new
    national effort. I've asked Congress to invest in and I'm asking young
    people to participate in a special effort in national service and
    leadership training just this summer. We are going to recruit about
    1,000 young people from every background, from high school dropouts to
    college graduates, to send to an intensive leadership training program
    for national service at the beginning of the summer.
        Then we'll ask them to work on one of our country's most urgent
    problems, helping our children who are in danger of losing their God-
    given potential. Some of them will tutor. Some will work on programs to
    immunize young children from preventible childhood diseases. Some will
    help to develop and run recreational centers or reclaim urban parks from
    dealers and debris. Some will counsel people a few years younger than
    themselves to help keep them out of gangs and into good activities. And
    everyone will learn about serving our country and helping our
    communities.
        At the end of this summer, we'll bring all these people together for
    several days of debriefing and training, and then they'll all join in a
    youth service summit. I will attend the meeting, and I expect to listen
    a lot more than I talk. I'll ask leaders from Congress, from business,
    labor, religious, and community groups to attend the youth service
    summit too. We'll give those who serve the honor they deserve, and we'll
    learn a lot more about how to build this

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    national service program. And from the thousand pioneers of this summer,
    I want the national service to grow 100-fold in the next 4 years.
        But even when hundreds of thousands are serving, I want to maintain
    the pioneer spirit of this first few months, because national service
    can make America new again. It can help solve our problems, educate our
    people, and build our communities back together. So if anybody here
    would like to be one of those 1,000 or if anybody who is listening to
    this speech by radio or television or reads about it would like to be
    one of those 1,000, drop me a card at the White House and just mark it
    ``national service.'' We're going to pick them, and I can't promise
    you'll be selected, but I promise you'll be considered. I want to engage
    the energies of America in this effort.
        I also want to say that you shouldn't wait for the summer or for a
    new program. We need to begin now. We are going to be looking for the
    kinds of ideas that we ought to be funding. This is Monday. I ask you by
    Friday, every one of you, to think about what you think you can do and
    what we should do to be agents of renewal; to talk with your parents,
    your clergy, your friends, your teachers; to join the effort to renew
    our community and to rebuild our country; and to write to me about what
    you are doing. It's time for millions of us to change our country block
    by block, neighborhood by neighborhood; time to return to our roots an
    excitement, an idealism, and an energy.
        I have to tell you that there are some among us who do not believe
    that young Americans will answer a call to action, who believe that our
    people now measure their success merely in the accumulation of material
    things. They believe this call to service will go unanswered. But I
    believe they are dead wrong.
        And so, especially to the young Americans here, I ask you to prove
    that those who doubt you are wrong about your generation. And today I
    ask all of you who are young in spirit, whether you are a 10-year-old in
    a service program in our schools who reads to still younger children or
    a 72-year-old who has become a foster grandparent, I ask you all to
    believe that you can contribute to your community and your country. And
    in so doing, you will find the best in yourself.
        You will learn the lessons about your life that you might not ever
    learn any other way. You will learn again that each of us has the spark
    of potential to accomplish something truly and enduringly unique. You
    will experience the satisfaction of making a connection in a way with
    another person that you could do in no other way. You will learn that
    the joy of mastering a new skill or discovering a new insight is
    exceeded only by the joy of helping someone else do the same thing. You
    will know the satisfaction of being valued not for what you own or what
    you earn or what position you hold but just because of what you have
    given to someone else. You will understand in personal ways the wisdom
    of the words spoken years ago by Martin Luther King, who said,
    ``Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.''
        I ask you all, my fellow Americans, to support our proposal for
    national service and to live a proposal for national service, to learn
    the meaning of America at its best, and to recreate for others America
    at its best. We are not just another country. We have always been a
    special kind of community, linked by a web of rights and
    responsibilities and bound together not by bloodlines but by beliefs. At
    an age in time when people all across the world are being literally torn
    apart by racial hatreds, by ethnic hatreds, by religious divisions, we
    are a nation, with all of our problems, where people can come together
    across racial and religious lines and hold hands and work together not
    just to endure our differences but to celebrate them. I ask you to make
    America celebrate that again.
        I ask you, in closing, to commit yourselves to this season of
    service because America needs it. We need every one of you to live up to
    the fullest of your potential, and we need you to reach those who are
    not here and who will never hear this talk and who will never have the
    future they could otherwise have if not for something that you could do.
    The great challenge of your generation is to prove that every person
    here in this great land can live up to the fullest of their God-given
    capacity. If we do it, the 21st century will be the American century.
    The American dream will be kept alive if you will today answer the call
    to service.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:15 p.m. at Rutgers University. In his
    remarks, he referred to Nakia Tomlinson, a Rutgers student, and Benjamin
    Barber, founder of the Rutgers Civic Education and Community Service
    Program.