[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.