    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [October 12, 1993]
    [Pages 1732-1738]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill
    October 12, 1993

        Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, President
    Spangler, President Friday, Chancellor Hardin, my good friend, Governor
    Hunt, and other distinguished platform guests, ladies and gentlemen.
        I must say I have thought for a long time about what it might feel
    to be in a vast crowd of North Carolinians and have them do something
    besides root against one of my athletic teams from Arkansas. [Laughter]
        I began to think of this moment in August when I was on vacation,
    and I spent an evening with a person who used to be one of your great
    sons, James Taylor. And I asked him to sing ``Carolina in My Mind'' so
    that I could begin to think about what this day might mean to all of us.
    Five other Presidents have come to this great university to speak. None
    has ever had the opportunity to speak to a crowd like this, on this
    occasion of your 200th birthday as a university.
        I'd like to begin by thanking the students whom I have met and
    especially those who gave me this beautiful leather-bound book of
    essays, three of them, about the theme for this bicentennial celebration
    that the students chose, community. For it is in many ways what ought to
    be America's theme today, how we can be more together than we are apart.
        This university has produced enough excellence to fill a library or
    lead a nation, in novelists like Thomas Wolfe and Walker Percy; in great
    defenders of the Constitution like Senator Sam Ervin and Julius
    Chambers, now one of your chancellors; and Katherine Everett, a pioneer
    among women lawyers; and Francis Collins, a scientist who discovered the
    gene for cystic fibrosis; and journalists like Charles Kuralt and Tom
    Wicker and Deborah Potter and my Pulitzer Prize-winning friend, Taylor
    Branch; and leading business men and women like the head of the Small
    Business Administration in our administration, Erskine Bowles, who's
    here with me tonight and who, I dare say, is the ablest person ever to
    hold his position, probably because of the education he got here at the
    University of North Carolina. These are just a few of the many thousands
    of lives who have been brightened by what Mr. Kuralt so warmly referred
    to as the light and liberty this great university offers.
        There are few certainties in this life, but I've also learned that
    when March madness rolls around, I'll be hoping my Razorbacks are there,
    but I know that Dean Smith's Tar Heels will always be there.
        As one who grew up in the South, I have long admired this university
    for understanding that our best traditions call on us to offer that
    light and liberty to all. Chapel Hill has always been filled with a
    progressive spirit. Long before history caught up with him, as Mr.
    Kuralt just said, your legendary president, Frank Porter Graham, spoke
    this simple but powerful truth: ``In the South, two great races have
    fundamentally a common destiny in building a nobler civilization, and if
    we go up, we go up together.'' What a better life we might have had if
    more had listened to that at a single time.
        Your great State has also understood that education goes hand-in-
    hand with the expansion of democracy and the advancement of our own

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    economy. Under the leadership of men like Luther Hodges and Terry
    Sanford and Bill Friday, this university joined with your other State's
    great universities, the State government, and the corporate community to
    begin building an advanced research center to attract new businesses and
    jobs. Now the Research Triangle has more than 60 companies, more than
    34,000 employees; it is the envy of the entire Nation about what we can
    do if we strive to make change our friend.
        Tonight we celebrate the day this university began, the laying of a
    cornerstone that marks a milestone in the entire American journey,
    because on this day, near this place, 200 years ago, the cornerstone was
    laid for the first building in the first university in a Nation that had
    only recently been born.
        It was, to be sure, a time of hopeful and historic change, when the
    future was clear to those who had the vision to see it and the courage
    to seize it. It was a time of heroes such as William R. Davie: a fighter
    in the Revolution, a framer of the Constitution, a Princeton graduate
    who wanted a State university here to make education accessible to more
    than the privileged few. On October 12th in 1793, when General Davie
    laid the foundation for this university, he laid a foundation for two
    centuries of progress in American education.
        Historians tell us now that there was then a joyous ceremony, that
    ``the maple leaves flamed red in the eager air.'' Great joy there was,
    but remember now, it was in the face of great uncertainty. The wounds of
    the Revolutionary War had yet to heal. The debts had yet to be repaid.
    And the new democracy seemed still untested and unstable. Yet, in spite
    of all these problems, the Americans of that time had the courage to
    build what had never before existed, a great new republic and a public
    university.
        In spite of the obstacles, they decided to bet on the future, not
    cling to the past. That is the test for us today, my fellow Americans.
    Alexis de Tocqueville carried this uniquely American optimism, this
    faith in education, this commitment to change, when he wrote in his
    wondrous ``Democracy in America'': ``The Americans have all a lively
    faith in the perfectibility of man. They judge that the diffusion of
    knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of
    ignorance fatal. They all consider society as a body in a state of
    improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is or ought
    to be permanent, and they admit that what appears to them today to be
    good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.''
        For two centuries now, we've held fast to that faith in the future.
    For two centuries we've kept the courage to change. And for two
    centuries we've believed with Frank Porter Graham that we must go up
    together. Our Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred
    honor to a common cause. We fought a vast and bloody Civil War to
    preserve that common cause. Every battle to expand civil rights has been
    to deepen and strengthen that common cause, our ability to go up
    together.
        Now, after 200 years, and after 200 years of this university, we
    find ourselves a people of more than 150 different racial and ethnic
    groups confronting a challenge in this new era which tests our belief in
    the future, tests our courage to change, and tests our commitment to
    community, to going up together. Tonight we can best honor this great
    university's historic builders and believers, a dozen generations after
    our Nation and this university began, by meeting those tests.
        The cold war is over. The threat of nuclear annihilation is
    receding. Democracy and free markets  are  on  the  march.  Mandela and
    de Klerk, Rabin and Arafat have given people hope that peace can come
    out of any conflict.
        A global economy is taking shape in which information and investment
    move across national borders at stunning speed. And competition for jobs
    and incomes is intense. Expanding trade is critical to every nation's
    growth, and our greatest asset is no longer natural resources or
    material structures. It is the strength, the skills, the mind, and the
    spirit of our people.
        This is a world America has done a very great deal to make through
    two World Wars, the Civil War, the cold war, the establishment of global
    economic and trading missions, through the attempts to build the United
    Nations and other instruments of peace and harmony, of progress and
    democracy. It is full of hope. But as we all know, it is not without its
    heartbreak.
        There is less danger of a nuclear war between two nations but more
    danger of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the hands
    of people irresponsibly prepared to use them. The oppression of
    Communist control has disappeared, but that disappearance has reopened

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    ugly ethnic and religious divisions. The United Nations can do more good
    than ever before, but clearly there are limits to what outside forces
    can do to solve severe internal problems in some nations. We cannot
    withdraw from this world we have done so much to make, and we must face
    its difficulties and challenges. Through great trials we have stood with
    President Yeltsin for democracy, peace, and economic reform in Russia.
    In so doing we have helped the Russians, but we've made ourselves safer
    and better, too.
        We have sponsored and supported the peace process in the Middle
    East, for which you just clapped. And so doing, of course we have
    contributed to a better life for the Arabs and the Jews, but we have
    enhanced our own security as well.
        We have helped to save nearly 1 million Somalis from death,
    starvation, anarchy, and strengthened our argument that the world's poor
    and deprived need not turn to terrorism and violence for redress. In so
    doing we have advanced our interests, but some of our finest young
    soldiers have perished.
        Tonight before going on, I want to express here in North Carolina my
    profound gratitude and deep personal sympathy to the families of the six
    servicemen from Fort Bragg who were killed in Somalia: Sergeant Daniel
    Busch, First Class Earl Fillmore, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon, Master
    Sergeant Timothy Martin, Sergeant First Class Matthew Rierson and
    Sergeant First Class Randall Schugan. May God bless their souls and
    their families, and may we all thank them.
        Our Nation is grateful to them; so are most of the people of
    Somalia. I have ordered strong new steps to protect our troops, to
    ensure the return of our missing or captive Americans, to complete our
    mission in that nation in no more than 6 months, to finish that job
    quickly but to finish that job right.
        Just as we know we cannot withdraw from the world, we know here at
    this great university, that we cannot lead the world unless we are first
    strong at home. After all, in the beginning it was our values, our
    ideals, our strength, our willingness to work, to make the most of what
    was here on this continent that made us the envy of the world.
        And here at home, this new economy of ours offers much hope and
    opportunity. Yet every positive development seems to bring with it some
    jarring dislocation. The global economy not only rewards the educated,
    it punishes those without education.
        Between 1972 and 1992, while the work year got longer for most
    Americans, our wages stagnated. The 75 percent of our people who don't
    have college degrees felt it profoundly. Those who began but didn't
    finish college saw their wages fall by 9 percent just since 1979. For
    those who didn't go on to college, wages fell 17 percent. For those who
    left high school, wages dropped 20 percent. We got a lot of new jobs out
    of international trade, but we know we also lose some every year to
    competition from countries with lower wages or higher quality or
    sometimes unfair practices. We know that our health care is the finest
    in the world, but millions of us are just a pink slip away from losing
    their health insurance or one illness away from losing a life's savings.
        Most of our people are law-abiding citizens who love their families
    more than their own lives. But America leads the world in violent crime,
    has the highest percentage of its people behind bars, has 90,000 murders
    in the last 4 years, and more and more of our children are born into and
    grow up in family situations so difficult that it is hard even to make
    the arguments that the rest of us have taken for granted all of our
    lives.
        More and more of our children are growing up in a world in which the
    future is not what happens when they graduate from the University of
    North Carolina but what happens 15 minutes from now. We cannot long
    survive in a Nation with young people for whom the people has no allure
    and on whom the future has no claim. All of us who come here in
    gratitude to this great university, and others like it, are here because
    we believed in tomorrow. And that must be our urgent task: to restore
    that tomorrow for our young people.
        What is the point of all this for today? It is simply this. We are
    living in a time of profound change. No one can fully see the shape of
    the change or imagine with great precision the end of it. But we know a
    lot about what works and what doesn't. And we know that if we do not
    embrace this change and make it our friend, if we do not follow what de
    Tocqueville said we were about 150 years ago, if we do not follow the
    traditions on which this university was founded, then change will become
    our enemy. And yet all around our great

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    country today I see people resisting change. I see them turning inward
    and away from change. And I ask myself why.
        At a time when we know it's a matter of fact that every rich country
    in the world gains many new jobs through expanding trade, I see people
    saying, ``Well even though my industry will get more jobs, we shouldn't
    have a new trade arrangement with Canada and Mexico which could one day
    engulf all of Latin America.'' And when I listen to the arguments, I
    hear instead of arguments against this agreement, I hear the grievances
    of the 1980's, the grievances of times when workers were fired without
    thought, when investments were not made, when people were abused.
    Instead of a reasoning argument about what will build America tomorrow,
    I hear a longing for yesterday.
        But I tell you my friends, as certainly as it was true 200 years ago
    today, yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only
    lose tomorrow.
        But I think we can say we know some things about why we are
    resisting these changes and what we might do to make ourselves more like
    the founders of this great university, more like the founders of our
    great Nation, more like most of the students here on any given day at
    this university. When do people most resist change? When they are most
    insecure. Think of any child you ever raised. Think of any personal
    experience you ever had. Why is it that great universities provide
    wonderful libraries and beautiful lawns and space and time to study and
    to learn and to grow? So people can feel personally at peace and secure.
    It is that which enables us to learn and to grow and to change. And I
    say to you tonight, my fellow Americans, the mission of this university,
    the mission of every university, must be to be in the vanguard of
    helping the American people to recover enough personal security to be
    able to lead the changes that we are so urgently called on to make.
        What does that mean? What does that mean? I would argue among all
    things, it means at least three: First, we must make Americans more
    secure in their families and at work. In a world transformed by trade
    and technology it is no longer possible for a young person to go to work
    and keep a job until retirement or even often to stay with the same
    company. The economy is creating and losing millions of jobs constantly.
    Most people now who are laid off from their jobs never get the same old
    job back. Young people beginning their careers, on average, will change
    work seven times in a lifetime. The best jobs those young people here in
    the audience may ever have may be jobs yet to be created in companies
    yet to be founded based on technologies yet to be discovered.
        Economic security, therefore, can no longer be found in a particular
    job. It must be rooted in a continuing capacity to learn new things.
    That means we must have a system of lifelong learning beginning with
    higher standards in our schools. Almost two decades ago, your Governor,
    Jim Hunt, began an education reform program that included higher
    standards in these schools. Those efforts inspired other Governors
    around the country, including the then-Governor of South Carolina, now
    our Education Secretary, Dick Riley, and me. And I thank him for that.
        Now, we are trying to adopt a whole new approach in our national
    effort to raise standards in education. We believe the right standard
    for America isn't whether we are better than we were but whether we're
    the best in the world. This cannot be a Democratic or a Republican
    concern. It must be an American imperative. We know we have to expect
    more of our students and our schools. We have to regulate their details
    less but hold them to higher standards and measure whether our kids are
    really learning enough to compete and win in the global economy.
        Then we have to ensure that every young person in this country has
    the opportunity to get a college education, every last one who wants it.
    We have already this year reorganized the student loan programs to lower
    interest rates and ease the repayment terms and open the doors of
    college education to thousands of young people by giving them a chance
    to be in the national service program, to rebuild their communities from
    the grassroots up, and earn a part of their college education.
        For the three-quarters of our young people who do not get 4-year
    college degrees, we must merge the world of learning and the world of
    work to offer young people classroom training and on-the-job training.
    And for those who lose their jobs, the unemployment system is no longer
    good enough. We must create a continuous reemployment system so that
    people are always learning, even into their fifties and sixties and
    seventies, as long as they are willing to be productive citizens and to
    keep going and growing.

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        Another big part of job security that is often missed is that most
    workers are now parents, or at least most parents are now workers. And
    we can no longer force people to choose between being a good parent and
    a good worker. They must be able to be both. That is why people who work
    hard for marginal wages should not be taxed into poverty but lifted out
    of it by the tax system, and it is what this Government has done. For
    the first time ever we can say now, if you work 40 hours a week and you
    have children in your home, you can be lifted out of poverty.
        And that is why we have said you ought not to lose your job if you
    have a sick child or a sick parent. You ought to be able to take a
    little time off without losing your job because it is important to the
    fabric of America to stick up for the American family.
        A couple of Sundays ago when I came into the White House from my
    early morning run, I saw a father, a mother, and three daughters there
    taking a tour on Sunday morning, an unusual time. And I went over and
    said hello to them and learned that the family was there with the Make-
    A-Wish Foundation, because one of the daughters was desperately ill, and
    she wanted to see the President and see the White House. I talked to
    that family for a while, and then I came down and had my picture taken
    with them. And as I was walking away the father said, ``Mr. President,
    don't you ever think it doesn't matter what goes on up here. If it
    hadn't been for the family leave law coming in this year, I would have
    had to choose between spending this time with my precious daughter who
    may not make it, or working to support my family so that the rest of us
    could go on. No parent should ever make that choice, and I don't have to
    now.''
        That is what I mean by providing the American people the personal
    security they need to proceed to change in this world.
        The second element, after education and training, of our personal
    security must be health care. This is the only advanced nation in which
    people can lose their health care, where we don't have health care that
    is always there and that can never be taken away. Even though we spend
    40 percent more than any place else in the world, what does that mean?
    Lost productivity in small businesses, people really insecure about
    changing jobs because they've had someone in their family sick and they
    know if they change jobs that preexisting condition will keep them from
    getting new health insurance. So people walk around like this, millions
    of us all the time, 37.4 million Americans without any health insurance
    but many millions more knowing they could lose it like that.
        How can you be secure enough to change, to take on new challenges,
    to start new businesses, to take new risks, if you think that you may
    have to let your family go without basic health care? My fellow
    Americans, it does not happen in any other advanced nation, and it is
    time for us to say as a people it will no longer happen here. No more.
        And this last point I would make to you: If we are to be personally
    secure enough to make the changes and meet the tests of this time, we
    must protect our people better against the ravages of violence. Our
    people have the right to feel safe where they live, where they go to
    school, and where they work.
        My fellow Americans, I was in California the other night and I
    talked to people all across the State in a hooked-up town hall meeting.
    And this young African-American boy, a junior high school student, said,
    ``Mr. President, my brother and I, we don't want to be in gangs. We
    don't want to have guns. We don't want to cause any trouble. We want to
    learn. We want a future. And we thought our school was too unsafe. So we
    decided to go to another school and enroll in it because it was safer.
    And on the day we showed up to register for school, my brother was
    standing right in front of me, and he was shot,'' because he got in a
    crossfire of one of these mindless, arbitrary, endless shootings that
    occur among children on our streets and in our schools today. We have to
    stop this. We cannot let those children be robbed of their future.
        I know this State grieved recently when your native son Michael
    Jordan's father was killed. And I know we all wish him well as Michael
    embarks on a new journey in his life. But let us not forget that 22
    other men and women were killed in that same county in your State this
    year. Ten foreign tourists were killed in Florida this year, and the
    State grieved over it. But in our Nation's Capital, in one week this
    summer, more than twice that many people were killed. They were not
    famous, but they were the President's neighbors.
        It is heartbreaking. What can we do about it? We can put more police
    on our streets, not

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    to catch criminals just alone but also to prevent crime. It works.
    Thirty years ago there were three police for every violent crime. Today
    there are three crimes for every police officer. We have to give these
    people the help they need. And when they work the same neighborhoods and
    walk the same streets and talk to the same kids, they help to prevent
    crime.
        And I say this in North Carolina, coming from a State where in my
    home State, half the people have a hunting license or a fishing license
    or both, and we have to shut down factories and schools and towns on the
    opening day of deer season because nobody shows up anyway. But we still
    ought to pass the Brady bill so we don't sell guns to people with a
    criminal or a mental health history.
        And we should not allow in city after city after city our police
    officers to go to work every day knowing they will walk the mean streets
    of our cities with people who are better armed than they are, because
    this is the only country in the world where teenagers can have assault
    weapons designed only to kill other people and use them with abandon on
    the streets of our cities. We can do better than that.
        Do you know, my fellow Americans, that I learned just last week that
    someone shot today with a bullet is 3 times more likely to perish
    because they are likely to have 3 times as many bullets in them as they
    did just 15 years ago. It is time for us to stop talking about law and
    order and thinking about how we can organize ourselves to protect our
    culture, to protect our heritage, to keep our rights as sports men and
    women but to protect our kids' lives and their future. The time has come
    to face this problem.
        What has all that got to do with this? Because this is what the
    Founders did. They faced the problems of their time and gave the rest of
    us a chance to live in the most successful democracy ever known. The
    idea of the public university, born here in North Carolina, played a
    major role in revolutionizing opportunity for millions and millions and
    millions of Americans who never even came into this State but got that
    opportunity in other States because of the example set here.
        This is the challenge of our time, and we must meet it so that we
    can change: economic security, health care security, personal security.
    None of us can be secure until we are prepared to take personal
    responsibility for making these changes, and of building a new sense of
    community, each in our own way. Our jobs won't be responsible unless we
    are willing to learn new skills for a lifetime and until we all treat
    each other like indispensable partners, not disposable parts.
        Our health care won't be secure, even if we pass our health care
    bill, until all of us practice more preventive care. Our families won't
    be secure until fathers and mothers begin to realize that they have to
    put their children first. Our communities won't be secure until people
    who disagree on everything else stop shouting at each other long enough
    to realize that we have to save the kids who are in trouble the same way
    we lost them, one child at a time. And it imposes a responsibility on
    each and every one of us.
        But I tell you, my fellow Americans, I honestly believe that as you
    start the third century of this university's life we could be looking at
    the most exciting time America has ever known, if we have the security
    and the courage to change. We want to revitalize the American spirit of
    enterprise and adventure. We want to give our people new confidence to
    dream those great dreams again, to take those great risks, to achieve
    those great things.
        The security I seek for America is like a rope for a rock climber,
    to lift those who will take responsibility for their own lives to
    greater and greater pinnacles. The security I seek is not Government
    doing more for people but Americans doing more for ourselves and for our
    families, for our communities, and for our country. It is not the
    absence of risk. It is the presence of opportunity. It is not a world
    without change but a world in which change is our friend and not our
    enemy.
        We honor today the men and women who had the courage to create a new
    university in a new nation. We must, like them, be builders and
    believers, the architects of a new security to empower and embolden
    America and the University of North Carolina on the eve of a new
    century.
        The only difference between America two centuries ago and America
    today is the difference between dawn and high noon of a very beautiful
    day.
        In the words of your great alumnus, Thomas Wolfe, ``The true
    discovery of America is still before us. The true fulfillment of our
    spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land is yet to come.''
    Let us believe in those words

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    and let us act on them, so that 200 years from now our children, 12
    generations removed, will still celebrate this glorious day.
        Thank you, and Godspeed.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:24 p.m. in Kenan Memorial Stadium. In his
    remarks, he referred to C.D. Spangler, Jr., president, William C.
    Friday, president emeritus, and Paul Hardin, chancellor, University of
    North Carolina; James Taylor, entertainer; and Luther H. Hodges and
    Terry Sanford, former Governors of North Carolina.