    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [June 11, 1995]
    [Pages 844-848]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Ceremony in Hanover, New
    Hampshire
    June 11, 1995

        Thank you very much. President Freedman, Acting President Wright,
    Governor Merrill, thank you for your warm welcome. To my distinguished
    fellow honorees--I was thinking when they were all introduced, all the
    others who won this distinction of your honorary degrees, that if my
    blessed mother were still alive, she would be saying, ``See, Bill, they
    accomplished something; you're just a politician.'' [Laughter] I am
    honored to be in their company, and I thank them all for the
    contribution they have made to the richness that is American life. To
    the board of trustees and especially to the parents and families and
    members of the class of 1995, let me begin on a very personal note. I
    always love coming to New Hampshire. I am delighted to be back at
    Dartmouth, but I am especially grateful to be here seeing my good friend
    President Jim Freedman looking so very well and back here at this
    graduation.
        I also want to thank Dartmouth for something else, for contributing
    to my administration with the Secretary of Labor, Bob Reich, who came
    with me today. I understand that I have caused something of an
    inconvenience here--[laughter]--and that we are now breaking tradition
    here at Memorial Field, having left Baker Lawn. But I did a little
    historical inquiry and determined that when President Eisenhower came
    here in 1953, Baker Lawn replaced the Bema as the site of commencement.
    I am reliably informed, however, that the next time a President shows
    up, you will not have to move to the parking lot at the West Lebanon
    Shopping Center. [Laughter]
        You know, when President Eisenhower came here, he said, ``This is
    what a college is supposed to look like,'' And I have to tell you, even
    in the rain it looks very, very good to me.
        I want to thank you, too, for honoring the class of 1945. See them
    there? They did not have a proper commencement because they left right
    away to finish the work of World War II. One of the greatest privileges
    of my Presidency has been to express over the last year the profound
    gratitude of the American people for the generation that won World War
    II. A year ago this past Tuesday, I stood on the bluffs of Normandy to
    say to the brave people who won a foothold for freedom there, we are the
    children of your sacrifice. I say again to the class of 1945: The class
    of 1995, the generation of your grandchildren, and all of us in between
    are the children of your sacrifice, and we thank you.
        To those of you in this class, the 50 years that have elapsed since
    they sat where you sit today have been a very eventful time for this old
    world. It has seen the ultimate victory of freedom and democracy in the
    cold war, the dominance of market economics and the development of a
    truly global economy, a revolution in information telecommunications and
    technology which has changed the way we live and work and opened up vast
    new possibilities for good and for evil.
        The challenge of your time will be to face these new realities and
    to make some sense out of them in a way that is consistent with our
    historic values and the things that will make

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    your own lives richer. The challenge of your time, in short, will be to
    redeem the promise of this great country.
        Now there are unparalleled opportunities for those of you with a
    wonderful education in this global economy and this information age. And
    you don't have to worry about things that your parents used to worry
    about all the time. I am very proud of the fact that in the last 2
    years, for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are
    no Russian missiles pointed at the people of the United States of
    America. And I might add, there are no American missiles pointed at the
    people of Russia.
        From the Middle East to Northern Ireland, from South Africa to
    Haiti, where, as the citation said, my friend Bill Gray did such great
    work to restore democracy, we see ancient conflicts giving way to peace
    and freedom and democracy in a genuine spirit of reconciliation.
    Hundreds of millions of people now breathe the air of freedom who, less
    than a decade ago, found it a distant dream. Every country in Latin
    America but one is now a democracy.
        I am proud that our Nation could support these developments. But as
    all of you know, this new world is not free of difficulty, for the
    forces of opportunity contained within them seeds of destruction. The
    heavy hand of communism and dictatorships have given way to bloody
    conflicts rooted in primitive religious, ethnic, and racial hatreds from
    Europe to Africa. The mobility of money and people and the advance of
    technology have strengthened the hand of organized crime and drug
    traffickers from Latin America to Asia to the former Soviet Union. And
    we have all been reminded recently that none of us in this open, free-
    flowing world of ours are immune from the forces of organized evil and
    terrorism.
        The possibilities of more rapid economic development have posed new
    threats to the global environment. Rapid changes in the world economy
    have brought vast new opportunities, but they have also brought
    uncertainty, stagnant incomes, and indeed, rapid insecurities, even in
    the wealthiest countries in the world. And we have seen it in ours.
        Here at home, though we have made progress on our deficit and
    expanding our trade and taking serious action against crime and trying
    to increase the ability of our country to educate our people and to
    welcome those from around the world, as so many of you have come to find
    your educational opportunity here, we know that for the first time since
    this generation left in World War II, Americans are worried that their
    children will not have a better life than they enjoyed. Half of all of
    our people are working harder for less than they were making 15 years
    ago, because the global economy punishes people who don't have the
    skills to learn to compete and to win in a world that is changing daily,
    indeed, hourly.
        In our Nation, for the first time since World War II, we have
    watched, over the last decade and more, the great American middle class
    which is the core of our idea of America begin to split apart along the
    fault line of education. And of course, we all know that our social
    fabric today in this country is being rent apart by what is happening to
    our children. More and more of them are subject to violence and abuse. A
    higher and higher percentage of them are born into poverty. More and
    more of them are having children while they're still children. Even
    though the overall crime rate in this country has gone down, random
    violence among children is still increasing. More and more children are
    spending more of their lives with one-parent families, sometimes trapped
    on welfare, but more often, far more often, being raised by utterly
    exhausted parents who are working two or more jobs to give their
    children a chance, just a chance, at a good life.
        Because in the 1980's we were unable to resolve these problems,
    because inequality and insecurity increased, because the realities of
    today and tomorrow were not addressed, the American people have
    continued to lose faith in the ability of their Government and
    sometimes, even more importantly, in the ability of our society to solve
    these problems. And perhaps the most important difficulty we face is the
    increasing cynicism of our own people.
        Today in Washington we're having a great debate about what to do
    about all this, and that's a very good thing. On the one side, we have
    people who say that most of these problems are personal and cultural,
    and if all of us would just straighten up and fly right we wouldn't have
    these problems anymore. And of course, at a certain level that is self-
    evidently true. None of you would have a diploma today if you hadn't
    done the right thing to earn it. And nothing can be done for anyone to
    get out of a tight in life unless people are willing to do for
    themselves. But that ignores the other

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    side of the debate, which is that there are plain economic and social
    factors that are not even common to the United States, putting pressure
    on people and taking away their hopes and threatening their dreams.
        We have a great debate about what the most important thing for our
    Government to do is. On the one side are those who say that the
    Government can't really do anything to solve our problems anyway, so the
    most important thing is to balance the budget as quickly as possible
    without regard to the consequences. On the other hand, there are those
    who say we have a budget deficit and we ought to do something about it,
    but we have an education deficit as well. And when we have so many poor
    children, we need to invest in people to make sure they can live up to
    their God-given potential and that that is also important.
        Today what I want to say to you is, wherever you come down in all
    these great debates, the most important thing is that you should be a
    part of the debate because your life will be far more affected by what
    happens in the next 2 years than my life. I have been given the
    opportunity of the American dream. I was the first person in my family
    ever to graduate from college. When I was a young boy growing up in
    Arkansas, one of our honorees President Overholser's father was the
    Presbyterian minister in my hometown. He raised one daughter to be the
    president of Duke, the other daughter to be the editor of the Des Moines
    Register. We came out of a place that, at the end of World War II, had
    an income barely over half the national average. But we were fortunate
    enough to live through a time when opportunity was expanding and when we
    were trying to come to grips with our racial and other problems in this
    country.
        And what I wish to say to you is that you are going into the time of
    greatest human possibility in all history, but you must address the fact
    that all of our forces of opportunity have seeds of destruction. You
    must make sense and clarity out of complex problems. And I think you
    must do it with a much greater sense of optimism and hope than we are
    seeing in most debate today. There is nothing wrong with this country
    that cannot be solved by what is right with it, and you should never
    forget that.
        We have a lot of things to do here in America. We have to grow our
    middle class again and shrink our under class and give our children
    something to say yes to. We have to strengthen our families and our
    communities and make the idea of work more real to people for whom it
    has become unattainable. We have to preserve our environment and enhance
    our security at home and abroad. And I would argue that we must maintain
    the leadership of the United States in the world as a force for peace
    and freedom.
        To all those who want to withdraw, who want to turn away, who want
    to abolish our foreign assistance programs, let me remind you: Look at
    the history of the 21st century. Every time America turned away from the
    world, we wound up with a war that we had to clean up and win at far
    greater costs than if we simply stayed involved in a responsible manner.
        But our most important mission today, I would argue, is to help
    people make the most of their own lives. You can come down in many
    places on all these debates in Washington and around the country, but it
    is self-evident that unless people in this country, wherever they come
    from, whatever their race or economic standing or region, can make the
    most of their own lives, whatever is in there--the magic inside all of
    us--we will not fulfill our common destiny.
        And today, more than ever before, it really does all begin with
    education, what we know and what we can learn. The class of 1945 saw the
    greatest explosion of economic opportunity in all human history after
    World War II, in no small measure because every one who participated was
    given the opportunity to get a higher education through the GI bill. And
    I am absolutely convinced that that was one of the two or three reasons
    that the United States of America developed the finest, largest,
    broadest, deepest system of higher learning in the entire world. And it
    is still the best system in the entire world because of what happened
    then.
        When President Eisenhower faced the dilemma of the Soviets beating
    the United States into space and the fact that we had let a lot of our
    educational opportunities go downhill, he launched a great education
    initiative, giving loans to people all across the country and giving
    them good opportunities to pay them back. And they called it then the
    National Defense Education Act. The idea was that even in the late
    fifties, education was a part of our national security.

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        I tell you that that is more important today than it was in 1945 and
    more important today than it was in the late fifties. Men my age,
    between 45 and 55, grew up believing that when we reached this age, we'd
    have the security of knowing we could send our children to college, we'd
    have a decent retirement, we'd be living in our own homes, if illness
    came we'd be able to take care of it. We took these things for granted
    if we worked hard, obeyed the law, and paid our taxes. In the last 10
    years, earnings of men between the ages of 45 and 55 have gone down 14
    percent because in the global economy, if you live in a wealthy country
    and you don't have an education, you are in trouble. We cannot walk away
    from our obligation to invest in the education of every American at
    every age.
        And to those who think there is no public role in that, I say: Just
    remember all of those who need those student loans, who need those Pell
    grants, all the universities who benefit from the research investments.
    There is a role for our Nation in the national education agenda of our
    future, and we should maintain it.
        But let me make one other point as well. Education is about more
    than making money and mastering technology, even in the 21st century.
    It's about making connections and mastering the complexities of the
    world. It's about seeing the world as it is and advancing the cause of
    human dignity. Money without purpose leads to an empty life. Technology
    without compassion and wisdom and a devotion to truth can lead to
    nightmares. The sarin gas in the Japanese subway was a miracle of
    technology. The bomb that blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City
    was a miracle of technology. We have got to use our knowledge to become
    wiser about the things which we do not understand and to find ways to
    use our knowledge to bring us together in ways that reinforce our common
    humanity.
        I want to thank Governor Merrill for his support here in New
    Hampshire for our national service program, AmeriCorps, because I think
    it exemplifies that kind of objective. And I want to thank Dartmouth for
    participating in it.
        The idea behind national service is to make a connection between
    ideas and the real world of need out there beyond the ivory towers of
    academia, to make a connection between earning an education and
    advancing the quality of life for others who may not have it, a
    connection to be wanting to be respected for who you are and what you
    believe and not demeaning or demonizing those who are different.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to the medical school for the
    partnership in health education project of the Koop Institute, which
    sends medical students into elementary schools up here in New Hampshire
    and in Vermont to help to promote health and prevent disease among young
    people. That also is a purpose of education, building connections,
    giving to others, helping to bind us together.
        A society is not a collection of people pursuing their individual
    economic, material self-interests. It is a collection of people who
    believe that by working together they can raise better children, have
    stronger families, have more meaningful lives, and have something to
    pass on to the generation that comes behind. That also is the purpose of
    education, and we need it more than ever today.
        And so, my fellow Americans, and those of you who will live and work
    here, you must decide: What is this new world going to be like? You can
    probably do fine, regardless. You have a world-class education at a
    wonderful institution. You have the luxury of deciding. Will you devote
    your lives and your compassion and your conviction to saying that
    everybody ought to have the opportunity that you had? Will you believe
    that there is a common good and it's worth investing a little of what
    you earned as a result of your education in? Will you believe that
    education is about more than economics, that it's also about
    civilization and character? You must decide. Will you work for more
    equality and more opportunity? Will the information superhighway be
    traveled by all, even poor kids in distant rural areas? Will they be
    connected to the rest of the world, or will the information superhighway
    simply give access on the Internet to paranoids who tell you how to make
    bombs? Will education lead you to lives of service and genuine
    citizenship or a politics of hollow, reactionary rhetoric where, in the
    name of reducing Government, we abandon the public interests to the
    private forces of short-term gain?
        Just a few days ago, at Harvard, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech
    Republic said that our conscience must catch up with our reason or all
    is lost. I say to you today, we are having a great debate in the
    Nation's Capital, and we ought to have it. It can be a good and healthy

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    thing. But some things must be beyond debate. We are all in this
    together.
        A country at a crossroads has a chance always to redeem its promise.
    America is the longest lasting democracy in human history because at
    every crossroads we have redeemed that promise. And you must do it again
    today.
        We've got a real chance to make a real life together, folks. Yes,
    there's more ethnic and racial diversity in this country than in any
    other large country. Yes, there's more income differential, and that's
    getting worse, and it's troubling. But this is still, for my money, the
    country that's the best bet to keep alive hope and decency and
    opportunity for all different kinds of people well into the next
    century.
        I've had the privilege of representing you all over the world, and I
    think all the time, every day, about what it's going to be like in 20 or
    30 or 40 or 50 years, when you come back here for that remarkable
    reunion that they're celebrating today. And I am telling you, if you
    will simply use what you have been given in your lives, from God and the
    people who have helped you along the way, to rebuild this country and to
    bring it back together and not to let us be divided by all these forces,
    to lift up these forces of opportunity and to stamp out the seeds of
    destruction, you still are at the moment of greatest possibility in all
    human history.
        Your late president, John Kemeny, who came to this country after
    fleeing Hungary, told the last commencement he presided over in 1981,
    the following: ``The most dangerous voice you'll ever hear is the evil
    voice of prejudice that divides black from white, man from woman, Jew
    from Gentile. Listen to the voice that says man can live in harmony. Use
    your very considerable talents to make the world better.'' Then he ended
    the speech with, as I understand, the words with which he ended every
    commencement: ``Women and men of Dartmouth, all mankind is your brother.
    And you are your brother's keeper. Do not let people divide you one from
    another.''
        Do not let people make you cynical. And do not think for a minute
    that you can have a good, full life if you don't care about what happens
    to the other people who share this Nation and this planet with you.
        Good luck, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:44 a.m. on Memorial Field. In his
    remarks, he referred to James Freedman, president, and James Wright,
    acting president, Dartmouth College; Gov. Stephen Merrill of New
    Hampshire; and honorees William H. Gray III, Special Adviser on Haiti,
    and Nannerl Overholser Keohane, president, Duke University.