    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [November 1, 1993]
    [Pages 1875-1877]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1875]]

    Remarks on Signing the Executive Order on Historically Black Colleges
    and Universities
    November 1, 1993

        Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, Secretary Riley. Ladies and
    gentlemen, it's a great pleasure for me to be here today with my
    longtime friend chancellor Vic Hackley and with so many of the
    distinguished persons in the audience: Dr. Sam Myers; Dr. Joyce Payne;
    our longtime friend Bill Gray; Dr. James Cheek, we're glad to see you
    here; Dr. Art Thomas; General Alonzo Short is here, I'm glad to see you,
    General Short; and Mr. Emmett Paige, the Assistant Secretary of Defense
    for Command, Control, and Intelligence. And I also know that in addition
    to the Members of Congress already introduced, Congressman Bobby Scott
    from Virginia just came in. Somewhere he's standing; I saw him. Thank
    you for coming.
        Now, since the Vice President was so parochial--[laughter]--I have
    four people here I want to introduce: my friends Dr. William Keaton,
    from Arkansas Baptist College, in the back there; Dr. Katherine Mitchell
    from Shorter College, I saw Katherine over here; Dr. Lawrence Davis,
    from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff; and Dr. Myer Titus from
    Philander Smith College, where I used to run every day in my former
    life.
        I am so glad to see all of you here. For 130 years the institutions
    you represent have been beacons of hope and opportunity for Americans
    for whom no other options existed. You have nurtured young minds. You
    have built self-esteem. You've educated some of our Nation's foremost
    scholars and leaders. When Thurgood Marshall was refused admittance to
    the University of Maryland Law School because of the color of his skin,
    it was Howard University Law School that prepared him for the challenge,
    for the United States Supreme Court. Seventeen Members of the United
    States Congress are graduates of historically black institutions of
    higher education, as well as one United States Senator who is not an
    African-American, Senator Harris Wofford from Pennsylvania, a graduate
    of Howard Law School.
        Martin Luther King's way to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Prize
    was, as the Vice President said, plainly paved by the fact that he was a
    Morehouse man. The rhythms of my friend Toni Morrison's writings, which
    garnered her this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, are rooted in her
    study of classics and literature at Howard University.
        In seeking the best and most skilled Americans to serve here in our
    administration, graduates from historically black colleges and
    universities have been a part of our team. Energy Secretary Hazel
    O'Leary and the Assistant to the President for Public Liaison, Alexis
    Herman, are Xavier graduates. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and Under
    Secretary Bob Nash attended Howard. Our Surgeon General, Joycelyn
    Elders, was a graduate of Philander Smith. Sarah Summerville, my Alabama
    campaign coordinator and now at the Department of Defense, attended both
    Mississippi Industrial and Miles Colleges. And there are many more.
        The Executive order I sign today and all the education initiatives
    that Secretary Riley discussed have to do with change, preserving
    educational institutions and ensuring that every young person in this
    country who wants to get a college education has the opportunity to do
    it and finding new ways to get people into college and into training
    programs and to help them succeed once they're there.
        Since the average person will change jobs seven times in a lifetime,
    and the 1990 census makes it crystal clear the very harsh economic
    consequences of not having at least 2 years of post-high school
    education, we know we have much to do. This year we have begun already
    by reorganizing the student loan programs to cut their costs of
    overhead, to lower the interest rates, to change the repayment terms so
    that young people can now borrow money without fear of being bankrupted
    in paying the loans back. Now young people can borrow the money at lower
    interest rates and then elect to pay them back as a percentage of their
    incomes, without regard to the amount of the loan, so that no one will
    ever be discouraged from borrowing the money and, even more important
    perhaps, from taking a job after college which might not be a high-
    paying job but which might do an awful lot of good for our society, a
    job in our inner cities as a teacher perhaps or work-

    [[Page 1876]]

    ing in a program to help our young people. I'm very proud of the changes
    that we made in the student loan program, and I thank Secretary Riley
    for his outstanding leadership in that regard.
        We have also passed the national service program which will give,
    over the next 3 to 4 years, up to 100,000 young Americans a chance to
    earn some credit against their college education and help to serve their
    communities at the grassroots level, to rebuild lives and to build their
    own minds in the process.
        The Goals 2000 legislation, which Secretary Riley mentioned and to
    which the Vice President alluded, will forge a new partnership between
    our National Government and States and communities to set some
    meaningful national standards about what our young people should know,
    because we know that they're going to be competing in a global economy,
    and they're entitled to have a shot at the best we have to offer.
        With this Executive order and working in close cooperation with
    Secretary Riley and Catherine LeBlanc, the Executive Director of the
    White House Initiative Office, we'll expand the opportunities for
    participation in Federal programs. Ultimately, we'll strengthen the
    capacity of historically black colleges and universities to provide
    quality education. Within the next few days, I'll announce my
    appointments to the Presidential Advisory Board on Historically Black
    Colleges and Universities and will ask my longtime friend and the former
    chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Vic Hackley, now
    at Fayetteville State University, to serve as the Chair.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to the current board, which
    was appointed by President Bush, for their service and commitment and
    especially to Dr. James Cheek for his leadership. And I thank you, Dr.
    Cheek, for what you have done.
        I'd like to close by mentioning a very disturbing article that
    appeared in the morning paper here. You may have seen it, about children
    in our Nation's Capital, not even teenagers, discussing their own
    funerals, planning their funerals, thinking about what they would wear
    and what music they hope would be played. I am profoundly concerned as
    we take up the debate this week on the crime bill, on the Brady bill, on
    the establishment of boot camps as alternatives to prison for young
    people, on trying to get more law enforcement officers on our streets,
    that we not underestimate the gravity of the task before us. Somehow we
    have to get those young people to you, and through you, to the world.
        I know this is a difficult, frustrating, perplexing time. Every day
    the Vice President and I start the morning together talking about
    problems that have no easy solution. But I know that this ought to be a
    time of immense celebration and hopefulness for the American people with
    the end of the cold war, with the receding threat of nuclear
    annihilation, with the clear evidence that, for all of our problems, our
    economy is doing better than the other wealthy countries in creating
    jobs and promoting growth and that there is so much out there for us
    still to do.
        But the truth is that we are squandering our most valuable resource,
    our young people, at a rate that no other nation would tolerate. We
    permit so many of them to grow up without the basic supports of family
    and community. We permit many of them to live in circumstances, frankly,
    more dangerous than those experienced by people we go halfway around the
    world to protect. And so many of them, by the time they are old enough
    for you to get ahold of them, aren't there for you to get hold of.
        I say that not to end this on a down moment but to remind you of
    just how important this is, what you are doing. A lot of these kids
    still won't have a chance if you don't do your job well. And we have to
    find a way for you to reach them at an even earlier point. And if we
    want to make it, we've got to find a way to remind the rest of America
    that we are really all in this together. We cannot afford to have 11-
    year-olds thinking about their funerals. They need to be thinking about
    their children. You can do that.
        Thank you very much.

    [[Page 1877]]

    Note: The President spoke at 1:38 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive
    Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Sam Myers, president,
    National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education; Joyce
    Payne, director, Office for the Advancement of Public Black Colleges;
    William H. Gray III, CEO and president, United Negro College Fund; Art
    Thomas, former chairman, National Association for Equal Opportunity in
    Higher Education; and Lt. Gen. Alonzo E. Short, Jr., USA, Director,
    Defense Information Systems Agency. Following his remarks, the President
    signed the Executive order, which is listed in Appendix D at the end of
    this volume.