[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[May 20, 1994]
[Pages 959-964]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the University of California in Los Angeles, California
May 20, 1994

    Thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this wonderful 
occasion and for the university medal. You know, for a person like me 
who is a diehard basketball fan, just walking in Pauley Pavilion is a 
great honor. I dreamed of being here for many years, but I never thought 
that it would be on this kind of occasion. [Laughter] I'm proud to be 
here to honor the university's 75th anniversary and to honor your 
chancellor on his 25th anniversary of service. It is the sort of 
commitment our country could do with more of, and I honor it, and I know 
you do, too.
    To my good friend Mayor Riordan; President Peltason; Regent Sue 
Johnson; President Shapiro; to Carol Goldberg-Ambrose, the chair of your 
Academic Senate; to Kate Anderson and Khosrow Khosravani--we had a great 
talk over there. I hope we didn't earn any conduct demerits. But the two 
students told me a lot about UCLA. [Laughter] To all of you, I thank you 
for the chance to be here. The spirit in this room has been truly moving 
to me today.
    This is a sad day for our country and for my family because we mourn 
the loss of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was a remarkable woman of 
courage and dignity, who loved things that ennobled the human spirit. 
She and President Kennedy inspired me and an entire generation of 
Americans to see the nobility of helping others and the good that could 
come in public service. In later years, and particularly in this last 
year, it was my family's privilege to get to know her personally and to 
see that the image which was projected to all the world was more than 
met by the true person behind the image. Today, as we offer our prayers 
and best wishes to her family, I think it well to remember that Jackie 
Kennedy and her husband called us to a time when the world was full of 
challenges

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that we saw in terms of possibilities, not problems. We saw our own 
lives in terms of promise, not pessimism. We thought our job here on 
Earth was to build up, not tear down; to unite, not to divide.
    I say to the students who are here from this magnificent 
institution, you now have an education as fine as the world can afford. 
The question now is, as you go out into the world, what is your attitude 
about yourselves, each other, your country, and your future.
    UCLA, as I watched that slide show it was clear to me again, is an 
example of America's faith in the future, the thing that's kept us going 
for 218 years now. Seventy-five years ago, this was just a tiny 2-year 
teachers college on a dirt road in Hollywood. Now, it's one of the 
leading research institutions in the world and a bridge to the future 
for tens of thousands of Americans and people who come from all around 
the world to be here.
    There's no better place to discuss the future than here in 
California, America's last frontier. For all of your present 
difficulties, don't ever forget that California is still America's 
America, the cutting edge for a nation still a symbol of hope and 
optimism throughout the world.
    I want to say that I very much envy those of you who are beginning 
your future here and now, on the edge of this new century. Many say that 
this generation of college graduates is filled with pessimism, with a 
sense of generational despair that our glory days are behind us. 
Americans of my generation have been bombarded by images on television 
shows, and even one book, about the so-called Generation X, filled with 
cynics and slackers. Well, what I have seen today is not a generation of 
slackers but a generation of seekers, and I am much encouraged.
    To be sure, you are beginning your journey in uncertain times. Many 
of the college graduates of 1994 were born in 1973. That was a watershed 
year in American life. You see, from the end of World War II until 1973, 
family income doubled in America, and we lived in an era of prosperity 
that we almost came to take for granted. The middle class grew ever 
larger and more secure; our country was stronger. People just took it 
for granted that they could get jobs they could hold for a lifetime, 
that they would always do better every year than they did the year 
before, that they would be able to afford to send their children to 
college, to have a comfortable retirement, to own their own homes, and 
to take care of their parents.
    Since then, most Americans have worked harder and harder for the 
same or lower incomes. Our society has suffered unbelievable stresses as 
broken homes and unwed mothers have become commonplace. In many places 
devastated by poverty and despair, we have seen the absolute collapse of 
families and work itself and the sense of community. And in that vacuum 
have rushed gangs and drugs and violence, the kind of random violence 
that today often makes neighbors seem like strangers and strangers 
thought of as enemies.
    In the time that many of you went from the first grade through high 
school graduation, when all this was going on, your National Government 
was embroiled in a sense of gridlock and paralysis and high rhetoric and 
low action. The deficit quadrupled, but there were no investments made 
adequate to the challenges of the future, and many of our tough problems 
were talked about but not acted on.
    Here in this county, you've experienced earthquakes of all kinds, 
not just the real earthquake of January but social and economic 
upheavals. The trends that are shaking and remaking our entire society 
have hit California first and hardest.
    Next month many college graduates will move on to their first full-
time jobs. And I wonder how many of you have, like me, laughed and 
almost cried reading that wonderful Doonesbury comic strip--that is, on 
some days I think it's wonderful; some days I'm not so sure--
[laughter]--which means I probably feel the same way about Mr. Trudeau 
that he feels about me--[laughter]--you know, the great Doonesbury strip 
about the students at the college graduation trading stories about their 
job openings and whether they're going to be selling blue jeans or 
flipping hamburgers. [Laughter] Well, it's funny, but it's not quite 
accurate. The truth is that education still makes a huge difference in 
what you can do with your lives and your future. It is still the key, 
indeed, more the key today than ever before.
    The truth also is that your destiny will be filled with great 
chances and great choices. As with every new generation in this country, 
you will make your mark by exploring new frontiers. Once the challenge 
was settling a new continent. Now it is preparing for a new century. And 
you face the next American frontier, which you

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can see here at UCLA all around you, living with people who may seem 
different, working with technologies that may seem difficult, pursuing 
markets and opportunities that may seem distant.
    For the rest of your lives you will face this choice. In the face of 
bewildering, intense, sometimes overpowering change, you can recoil. You 
can hope to do as well as you can for as long as you can simply by 
trying to hold the future at arm's length. Or you can act in the spirit 
of America or the State or this great university of which you are a 
part, the spirit of the families who sacrificed so much to bring you 
here. You can embrace the future with all of its changes and engage in 
what the late Oliver Wendell Holmes called ``the action and passion of 
your time.'' The choice you make as individuals and as a generation will 
make all the difference.
    Three times in this century alone our Nation has found itself a 
victor in global conflicts, World War I, World War II, and the cold war. 
Three times America has faced the fundamental question of which 
direction we would take, embracing or rejecting the future. Seventy-five 
years ago, when this university was founded, we faced one of those 
pivotal moments. At that time, just after the end of World War I, there 
was also wrenching change and enormous anxiety. The Nation's hottest new 
novelist was a man named F. Scott Fitzgerald. He described the so-called 
lost generation, the first that would graduate from UCLA. He said that 
they grew up, and I quote, ``to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all 
faiths in man shaken.'' America withdrew from the world, seeking 
security in isolationism and protectionism. An ugly withdrawal occurred 
here at home as well, a retreat into the trenches of racial prejudice 
and religious prejudice, of class bigotry and easy convenience, and a 
simple refusal to prepare our people to live in the world as it was.
    Ten years later, just 10 years later in 1929, that decade of neglect 
produced the Great Depression. And soon we learned we could not withdraw 
from a world menaced by dictators, and we found ourselves again in a 
world war.
    At the end of the Second World War, we made a very different choice 
as a people. We decided to reach out to the future together, together 
here at home and together with nations around the world. As Franklin 
Roosevelt said of the generation of my parents and the graduates' 
grandparents, they believed history was, I quote, ``a highway on which 
your fellow men and women are advancing with you.'' Abroad, we lifted 
former allies and former enemies from the ashes. At home, investment in 
the future began with the returning warriors. The GI bill helped 
millions of Americans to get an education, to buy homes, to build the 
great American middle class. We made a solemn covenant: We would help 
those who would help themselves.
    The wise decisions of that time built four decades of robust 
economic growth and expanding opportunity and laid the foundation for us 
to be able to win the cold war. Now, we stand at our third pivotal 
moment in this century. And you are designed to play the leading role. 
The cold war is over. It is up to all of us to keep the American dream 
alive here at home, even as it advances abroad. But this miracle of 
renewal must begin with personal decisions.
    I sought the Presidency in large measure because I thought my 
generation had not yet done its job for America. I did not want my 
daughter to grow up to be part of the first generation of Americans to 
do worse than their parents. As we were becoming more wonderfully 
diverse, I did not want her to live in a country that was coming apart 
when it ought to be coming together. I wanted to forge the two great 
sources of strength that our Nation has: the power of our representative 
Government, as manifested in the Presidency, to address the challenges 
of every age and time and the far, far greater power of the American 
people themselves to transform themselves, their families, and their 
communities, to seize the future and make it theirs.
    My generation's responsibility to you is heavy, indeed. We are 
working in Washington to meet it, working to turn around the economic 
difficulties. And we have made a good beginning: 3 million new jobs in 
15 months; 3 years of deficit reduction, 3 years of deficit reduction 
for the first time since Harry Truman was President; at the end of this 
budget cycle, the smallest Federal Government in 30 years, since John 
Kennedy was President, with all the savings going back to you to make 
America safer with more police officers on the street and programs to 
help our children stay out of crime and have a better future. We are 
investing in the technologies of tomorrow, from defense conversion to 
environmental protection to the information

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superhighway; with new attacks on our profoundest problems, from AIDS to 
women's health problems, to homelessness, to the deed to have enterprise 
development among the poor in cities and rural areas, to the terrible 
difficulties of our health care system. We are building education for a 
lifetime, from dramatic expansions in Head Start to permanent retraining 
programs for displaced adults. We are looking for new markets for our 
products and services with new trade agreements and new opportunities to 
sell our best efforts here around the world.
    My fellow Americans, this country is on the move, and California is 
coming back. But the real problem I believe we have today is the problem 
I came to talk to you about: What will the attitude of your generation 
be, and how will you approach the future that is before you?
    Jackie Kennedy and her husband made us believe that citizenship was 
a wonderful thing, that we all had the capacity to be better people and 
to work together, and that the things we could do together would make a 
very great difference indeed. If President Kennedy were alive today, he 
would be absolutely shocked at the pessimism, the negativism, the 
division, the destructive tone of public discourse in America today.
    We know we can do better. But if we are to do better, you will have 
to lead us by looking around at all this diversity you have celebrated 
today, by this devotion to community you have exhausted, and bringing it 
out of us.
    Just before I came here, I stopped briefly at Norton Air Force Base 
in San Bernardino, which, as you know, was one of the bases closed, to 
announce the progress we are making at rebuilding that community with a 
new computer center there, with turning over the land to a new airport 
and for other public purposes and eventually for economic development. 
And it's the first one of these bases in the country that the Government 
has finally said, let's help people build their economy instead of 
dragging this out til kingdom come. And it was a celebration that knew 
no party lines, knew no philosophical lines, knew no racial lines. 
Nobody was out there talking about left and right and liberal and 
conservative and Republican and Democrat. They were talking about how we 
could deal with the real problems and opportunities of those people, to 
pull that community together and push it forward into the future. That 
is what we must do as a people. And that is what your generation must do 
in order for America to fulfill its promise.
    Now, to do that in a great democracy, where there are a myriad of 
complex problems and legitimate differences of opinion, we must learn to 
do something as a people that we often take for granted in the 
university. We have to learn to talk to each other and to listen to each 
other, not to talk past each other and to scream at one another.
    We have been caught up in what the Georgetown professor Deborah 
Tannen calls a culture of critique. One sure way to get instant public 
standing in our popular culture is to slam somebody else. If you work on 
bringing people together and you talk about it, you're likely to elicit 
a yawn. But if you bad-mouth people, you can get yourself a talk show.
    This country was not built by bad-mouthing. Go back and look at the 
history of the Constitutional Convention. Go back and look at how people 
got together wildly different points of view and argued heatedly but 
always with a common love of this country and the values of freedom and 
mutual respect. We have to find a way in this age and time to restore 
that kind of discourse and that kind of respect. We cannot afford to 
engage in the citizenship of division and distraction and destruction. 
We have a future to build, and you must lead the way. You know you can 
do it, because of the way you have been educated here and the people 
from whom you have learned and with whom you've learned. And you can 
lead the way for the whole future of this country.
    It was because I believe that so strongly that I put at the center 
of what symbolizes our administration the national service corps, what 
we call AmeriCorps, the opportunity for tens of thousands of young 
people to work where they live or where they go to school, solving the 
problems of America at the grassroots, learning from each other, 
reaching across lines that divide them, and earning money for their 
educations at the same time. Rebuild America and educate a new 
generation--it's sort of a domestic GI bill and a domestic Peace Corps 
all rolled into one. It was inspired by efforts that I saw all over 
America over the last few years, efforts like the California Campus 
Compact, which your chancellor helped to found, which now commits more 
than 50 colleges and universities in this State to helping students 
serve their communities. At UCLA alone some 4,000 of you are

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working in more than 40 service programs, and I honor you for that.
    This summer 7,000 young Americans will work in a summer of safety, 
helping their communities to be less violent. Last summer in our first 
summer of service, thousands of people all over the country, including 
here in Los Angeles, taught young people everything from how to stay 
away from drugs to how to stay safe in an earthquake.
    Service creates heroes. I was interested in the three people 
acknowledged there by Chancellor Young, and I appreciate what he said. 
Let me say that there's one project I'd like to mention in particular 
which one of the young students is involved in, Saru Jayaraman, along 
with another student, Desiree DeSurra. They helped to found the Women In 
Support of Each Other, acronym WISE. This program, WISE, helped high 
school girls to make wise decisions to pursue their education and not to 
become single mothers. Desiree was one of three students selected to win 
this year's Chancellor's Humanitarian Award.
    Now, let me tell you what that means to me. That is America at its 
best, people helping people, telling people, ``Look, maybe the President 
should do something, maybe the chancellor of the university should do 
something, maybe the mayor should do something, but in the end, you also 
have to take responsibility for your own lives. You have to make good 
decisions in order to be part of a good future.''
    Thousands of young people just here on this campus alone have made a 
decision to make a difference. Beginning this September, AmeriCorps will 
enable tens of thousands of more to do that. I hope I live long enough 
to see hundreds of thousands of people in this program every year, 
earning their way to a better education by rebuilding America every day 
at the grassroots level.
    The point of all that I have said is this: The future is not an 
inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation. It is something you 
have to make in every generation, and it will be your achievement, not 
only for yourselves individually but for your generation, for your 
community, and for the larger community that is America.
    If you look around you at this incredible campus where minorities 
make up a majority, something that will be true for whole States in the 
not too distant future, you see the future. LA County with over 150 
different racial and ethnic groups, thousands of people in this county 
celebrating this month as Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month because 
of the number of people who live here; a few days ago in America we 
celebrated the Cinco de Mayo celebration, Mexican Independence Day, and 
it is now as big a celebration in America as it is in Mexico because of 
our diversity. Will it be a source of our strength in the global 
village, or will we permit it to divide us? I believe I know the answer. 
And I think you do, too.
    There's no reason to be cynical about the future, no matter how 
difficult our problems are. Look what's just happened in the last 4 or 5 
years since many of you came to the university here: the end of the cold 
war; the fall of the Berlin Wall. Just in the last year, Russia and the 
United States agree not to point nuclear weapons at each other anymore; 
Rabin and Arafat agree to self-government for the Palestinians in 
Jericho and the Gaza; the jailer and the jailed, de Klerk and Mandela, 
agree that South Africa free, united is more important than anything 
else.
    In just a few days from now, I will go to represent you at the 50th 
anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Just a few days ago, I was able to 
speak on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision 
in Brown v. Board of Education. It is very important for a great country 
to remember those moments. But remember this, my fellow Americans: When 
our memories exceed our dreams, we have begun to grow old. And it is the 
destiny of America to remain forever young.
    So I ask you this, young graduates, especially: When you see in a 
few days the glories of D-Day recounted, one of the most masterful 
mobilization of people to achieve a common objective, one of the most 
stunning examples of personal courage in all of human history, remember 
that it was the work of citizen soldiers who were mostly between the 
ages of 18 and 25, people who had grown up in the false prosperity of 
the twenties and the bitter realities of the thirties, people who read 
books and movies that portrayed them as slackers and the future as dark 
and cynical. But they rallied that day to a cause larger than 
themselves. And when they had done the job they were sent to do--to save 
their country, to save freedom, to save a civilization--they came home 
and got on with the business of making lives for themselves, their 
children, and their children's children.

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    Thanks to them and to God Almighty, you will probably never have to 
face that kind of challenge in your life but, instead, to face the 
challenges unique to your generation, the challenges of a new and wide-
open world, the challenges of breakdown here at home that we must 
reverse.
    I believe you are ready for that test and that you will meet it. You 
have the educational tools to meet it. You must now make sure that deep 
down inside you have the spirit, the drive, the courage, the vision. We 
are all depending on you.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:24 p.m. in Pauley Pavilion at the 75th 
anniversary convocation. In his remarks, he referred to Charles E. 
Young, chancellor, University of California-Los Angeles; Mayor Richard 
Riordan of Los Angeles; Jack W. Peltason, president, and Sue Johnson, 
board of regents vice chairperson, University of California; Harold T. 
Shapiro, president, Princeton University; Kate Anderson, president, UCLA 
Undergraduate Student Association; and Khosrow Khosravani, external vice 
president, UCLA Graduate Student Association.