[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[December 3, 1997]
[Pages 1704-1706]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Community in Akron
December 3, 1997

    Thank you very much, Dee Hammonds, for that introduction and for the 
welcome to the University of Akron. I have enjoyed being here very much, 
and I'm very grateful to President Ruebel and to all the officials and 
the students who did such a good job today. Mr. Mayor, County Executive 
Davis, Senator Glenn, Congressman Sawyer, Congressman Stokes, members of 
the city council, the State legislators and other officials, I hope you 
were proud of your fellow Ohioans today. I thought they were great on 
the town meeting.
    I want to say a special word of appreciation to all the people in 
Akron who have been a part of the Coming Together Project because it's 
one of the reasons we came here. We wanted to come to a place in the 
heartland of America which could embody the best of America's

[[Page 1705]]

past, present, and potential for the future and where people have been 
honest in dealing with issues of racial difference, and I compliment you 
on that.
    Let me also say that I really was very moved, as I have frequently 
been in such settings--but I was so impressed by the people who were 
part of our town meeting today, by their conviction, by their sincerity, 
by their passion, by the life they've lived, and by the good things they 
want for our country. And you must have been proud of them as well. I 
hope they spoke for all of you.
    I want to say again that this dialog, as part of our initiative on 
race, is something I decided to do because I think that we ought to be 
thinking about this not only today but what we're going to look like 
over the next 30 to 40 years. Most Americans have not even come to grips 
with the fact that we already have 5--next year we'll have 12--school 
districts with students from over 100 different racial and ethnic 
groups; that we will soon have our largest State, California, where 
Americans of European descent are not in the majority; that within 50 
years at the outside, there will be no single racial or ethnic group 
that will be in a majority in the United States. We have always said we 
were a nation built on the values of the Constitution, we were a nation 
of ideas, not of race or place. We are about to find out.
    And therefore, every effort made in every community across the 
country not only to stand up against discrimination but to reach out for 
understanding, for the resolution of honest differences, even to 
celebrate honest argument, is a very positive and important thing. And I 
want to say again, I want to urge you to continue this.
    If nothing else comes out of this meeting today we had, this 
townhall meeting, I hope it will be that other communities will think 
that they need some sort of permanent process like the Coming Together 
effort here that will go on and on and on and provide a forum for dialog 
for people to come in and be a part of, because all of our communities 
are changing so rapidly and the issues are changing that, in this case, 
the process really is a part of the solution. There has to be a way that 
people of good will can be heard on matters pertaining to racial 
difference and misunderstanding and problems as they come up.
    Let me say one other thing to all the students who are here. You 
heard a lot of people say today that they thought that education was a 
big part of the answer to this, and you also heard a lot of people say 
that there were nonracial problems in America that had a 
disproportionate impact on racial minorities--the lack of educational 
opportunity, the lack of economic opportunity. One of the things that 
I'm proudest of, and I wanted to say this while we have Senator Glenn 
and Congressman Sawyer and Congressman Stokes here--and Congressman 
Brown may or may not still be here; I don't know if he is--but this last 
Congress, when they passed the Balanced Budget Act, among other things, 
passed the biggest increase in support for people to go on to college 
since the GI bill was passed 50 years ago, the biggest increase in 50 
years.
    I do believe it will make it possible for us to guarantee at least 2 
years of college to virtually every American. Here's what they did. 
First of all, they raised the maximum Pell grant to $3,000 a year and 
made more people eligible for it, more independent students. Secondly, 
nationwide, in a 2-year period, we've gone from 700,000 to one million 
work-study positions, adding 300,000 over 2 years. The third thing we 
did was to provide for families to invest in their IRA's and make it 
easier for people to invest in an individual retirement account and then 
withdraw from it tax-free if the money is being used to pay for 
education of a child or of the saver himself or herself. And finally, 
the bill provides for a $1,500 tax credit--not deduction, credit--for 
the cost of the first 2 years of college and a 20 percent credit for the 
cost of the third and fourth years, of graduate school. Or if working 
people lose their jobs and need to come back and get further education 
and training, they can get tax credits to do it.
    So when you look at all this together, I think we can really say now 
that when you put that with the student loan changes we've made, which 
make it easier to pay those loans back over a longer period of time, 
that you can really say now there's no reason that anybody should not at 
least have 2 years of college in America, between the scholarships, the 
loans, and the tax credits. And that's an important thing that I want to 
see sweep the country.
    So the last thing I'd like to say is--I think the second speaker in 
our townhall meeting was

[[Page 1706]]

a young student who said, ``You know, this racial deal, it's basically a 
problem for older people, you know, people in their thirties and forties 
and fifties.'' [Laughter] And he got a lot of laughs out of it, but that 
may well be true. One thing is certainly true: Those of you in this 
audience who are students in this university, or even younger, will live 
the vast majority of your lives in a new century. Your children will 
have no direct experience with the things that have consumed the lives 
of all of us who are 50 or older. And in a profound way, whether we can 
come together across all the racial, religious, ethnic, and other lines 
that divide us, celebrating our diversity, being glad about it, being 
happy--we're a more interesting country because we are so different from 
one another--but still saying there are things that bind us together 
that are more important, that we can preserve our country as one America 
in the 21st century as a beacon of hope and freedom and opportunity, 
that will affect your lives far more profoundly than many of the other 
things that may grab the headlines today or tomorrow or the next day.
    So again I say, I hope you will continue the spirit and the dialog 
manifest in this town meeting today permanently, because we will always 
benefit from understanding one another, from knowing more about one 
another, and from feeling like we can be honest with one another when 
we're mad or if we have an honest disagreement or we don't think we're 
being treated fairly. And if we do it, then the chances are very high 
that we will be one America and that we will be a stunning rebuke to all 
those countries that have tragically taken the lives and the fortunes 
and the futures away from their children because they could not bridge 
their racial, their ethnic, their religious divides. That is not our 
America, and it never will be if people like you will act on what you 
saw and felt today.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:22 p.m. in the James A. Rhodes Arena at 
the University of Akron. In his remarks, he referred to Derwin (Dee) 
Hammonds, president, associated student government, University of Akron; 
Mayor Donald L. Plusquellic of Akron; and Summitt County Executive Tim 
Davis.