[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 25 (Monday, June 28, 1993)]
[Pages 1120-1123]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Northeastern University Commencement Ceremony in Boston, 
Massachusetts

 June 19, 1993

    Thank you very much. I must tell you, I have marched in many of 
these processions over the years. I don't think I ever marched in one 
that made me any happier than when we were coming down this line and all 
of you were giving me the ``high five.'' And when we arrived here on the 
podium, I turned to Senator Kennedy, and I said, ``Those are the people 
I ran for President to help. I'm glad to see them here today.''
    I want to say a special word of thanks to President Curry, to the 
faculty and staff for the honorary degree and the invitation to come. To 
Senator Kennedy and Senator Kerry, Congressman Frank and Congressman 
Meehan, to Mayor Flynn, and to my good friend Governor Dukakis, and all 
others who are here, but especially to the graduates and their families. 
I am so pleased to be here in the Boston Garden with you here today. I'm 
also glad to be here with someone who's spent a lot of time thinking 
about the graduates' future, the Secretary of Labor, Bob Reich, whose 
wife, Clare Dalton, is on the faculty here at Northeastern. Glad to be 
here.
    I know it's warm, and I don't want to prolong the introductory 
remarks, or any of them, for that matter. But since President Curry 
mentioned Senator Kennedy's role in student financial aid, I can't help 
but note that in the last few months, of all the Members in the United 
States Congress, one stands out at having achieved a phenomenal amount 
of support from Republicans and Democrats for initiatives to make this 
country a better place. For out of Senator Kennedy's committee, with big 
votes from Republicans and Democrats, have come the Family and Medical 
Leave Act of 1993, to give people the right to have a little time off 
when a baby is born or a parent is sick; a bill that will require the 
National Institute of Health to give far greater attention than ever 
before to issues affecting women's health and their children's; a bill 
that will enable us to immunize all the children of this country against 
serious childhood diseases; a bill that will set national academic 
standards for our public schools, to deal with what the former speaker 
said we needed to do before you get to college; and finally, the 
national service and student loan bills, which will open college 
education to all Americans by providing loans on more generous terms and 
allowing them to be repaid as a percentage of your earnings, no matter 
how much you borrow, so you'll never go broke repaying your loans, and 
allowing more young people to pay them back with service to their com- 

[[Page 1121]]

munities. All of that came through Senator Kennedy's committee.
    I want to congratulate all of you who've survived this 5-year 
program, and also I want to congratulate you on surviving the Boston 
traffic jams. That's the second greatest example of gridlock in the 
United States. [Laughter]
    I want to say, too, that I treasure a degree from an institution 
that really exalts public service, not only by elected officials but by 
private citizens as well. This year I received more than 200 invitations 
to address graduating classes. But Northeastern stood out to me because 
I believe you are a symbol of the American dream, built on education and 
work and community service, blending work and learning, having 
partnerships with the private sector in this wonderful community of 
yours to build people, which is, after all, the only real product 
America has ever been able to depend upon.
    When I was working so hard to put together this provision of student 
aid to make college loans available to all on lower interest rates and 
better repayment terms and to let more people repay their loans through 
community service either before or during or after college, it was 
students like you that I had in mind: hard-working, good people from 
either middle class families that could otherwise not afford a college 
education or from poorer families who want to work their way into a 
better life. You symbolize the very thing that America has always been 
about and that we must today get back to if we're going to revitalize 
this great Nation. And I'm very proud to be here with you today.
    I can also tell you that I was deeply impressed by Doug Luffborough, 
and if I could sing like him I wouldn't be up here today as President. I 
read an article about Doug and his mother and his family and his trials 
in working his way through college before I came here. In the article he 
said he planned to invite himself and his mother to the White House. 
[Laughter] Well, I'm going to beat him to the punch. I'd like for Doug 
and his mother to come to the White House.
    If any man in America knows what having a good, hard-working, 
strong, loving, and disciplining mother can mean, I certainly do. I know 
it can make all the difference in the world, as it did for Doug and as 
it has for me. I think it would be appropriate just sort of as a symbol 
of all the parents who are here if Doug's mother, Mrs. Elsa Luffborough 
Mensah, would stand up. I think she's over there. Stand up! Give her a 
hand. See her up there in the white dress? [Applause]
    I must tell you, ma'am, there are a lot of people of great and 
famous achievement who will never know the pride you must have felt when 
your son stood up here earlier today. I thought it was unbelievable, and 
I appreciate what you did.
    To all of you graduates here at Northeastern, because this is the 
largest co-op school in the Nation, you are a breed apart. By having the 
chance to work for 2 years in your field as you have earned your degree, 
you have experienced a world that many others of your counterparts all 
across America only anticipate when they walk up and get their degree. 
You embody the growing unity in this country between work and learning, 
based on the clear understanding that the average American must now 
change work eight times in a lifetime and what you earn depends upon 
what you can learn. Still, even with the jump your co-op education in 
this fine place has given you, some of you must be wondering whether 
you'll be able to find the right job or any job.
    I came here to tell you something very simple and straightforward: 
You have done your part, and you deserve the opportunity to have that 
job and to make a better life for yourself.
    For years and years, the challenges of the global economy and our 
inadequate responses to them have put unbelievable pressure on middle 
class families and middle class values. Most people have worked harder 
for less and paid more for education, for health care, for housing. For 
most of the 1980's, those with less than 2 years of post-high school 
education actually saw their incomes drop as they worked longer and 
longer work weeks. And in the last couple of years, even college 
graduates have begun to have a difficult time finding good jobs with 
growing incomes.
    Still, we know what works. We know that in this global economy, a 
good education

[[Page 1122]]

works. We know that investment in new technology works. We know that 
when business and workers and Government are cooperating for high 
productivity, that works. We know that grassroots efforts to build 
strong and safe communities and to give every person a chance work.
    A lot of Americans have worked on that, but we have not done it as a 
nation. For more than a dozen years we have spent too much time from the 
top down having our leaders just tell us what we want to hear, that 
taxes are bad and somebody else's spending is bad, but spending on you 
is good. And so we've seen the debt go from $1 trillion to $4 trillion, 
our deficit go from $74 billion to $300 billion a year. And 
unbelievably, our investment at the national level in the things that 
make us a rich country has not even kept up with inflation: investment 
in education, in environmental cleanup, in the new technologies that 
will permit us to convert from a defense-based to a domestic high-tech 
economy. We have not done what we ought to have done there. We have 
underinvested and still seen much of our future eroded by a massive 
debt.
    We have come to a time, my fellow Americans, when we have to bring 
to our public life as a nation the same brutal honesty that Doug's 
mother brought to him when she refused to let his difficult 
circumstances be an excuse not to succeed. We have to take as a people 
the same kind of advice your student speaker gave to you: Let's don't 
say, ``I could have. I should have. I would have.'' Let's say, ``We can. 
We will.'' And let's get about doing it.
    We are beginning to move this country, taking down the obstacles to 
progress and prosperity, putting our economic house in order, moving 
toward providing a national plan to provide affordable, quality health 
care to all of America's families and children, preparing ourselves to 
compete in the global economy. We have a long road to travel, but we see 
some hopeful signs.
    Because of the progress of the economic plan that I have presented 
to the Congress to bring down our deficit and increase investment in our 
people, interest rates have dropped to a 20-year low. That means that 
when you bring down the deficit and bring down interest rates, you free 
up money to be invested in productive things. What do lower interest 
rates mean? They mean lower home mortgages. They mean lower business 
loans. They mean lower consumer loans and car loans. They mean money 
that can grow the economy and create jobs. And it also means the 
Government doesn't have to spend so much of your tax money paying 
interest on the debt and can pay more financing college loans and an 
economic future that is worthy of the effort you have made to get here 
to this place today.
    In the first 4 months of this administration, over three-quarters of 
a million jobs were added to this economy. But we have to finish the 
job. The United States Senate is now coming to grips with the economic 
plan. It brings down our national deficit $500 billion over 5 years. And 
for every $10 we cut that deficit, $5 comes from spending cuts, $3.75 
comes from the wealthiest Americans whose taxes were reduced in the 
1980's, and $1.25 comes from the middle class. Two-thirds of the tax 
burden comes from people with incomes above $200,000 because they can 
best afford to pay.
    Now, there are some lobbyists and some legislators who don't like 
the plan, and they say things that are popular, not the kind of things 
that your parents told you when you had to kind of take a deep breath 
and go on but popular. They say, ``More cuts, less taxes,'' but no 
details. No details. Then when you look at the details, you find that 
the details hurt the middle class, the working poor, the vulnerable 
elderly, do less to create jobs and ensure our world economic 
leadership.
    So I say to you, we ought to ask of every American, what is your 
real alternative, not rhetoric, not chants that sound good, but give the 
American people as a whole the same sort of truth that every one of your 
families gave you or you wouldn't be here today. That's what you're 
entitled to, and that's what I'm determined to give you as President of 
the United States.
    My job is to make your future worthy of the efforts that brought you 
here today, to try to help to create a national interest that triumphs 
over anybody's special interests. You have done your part. It is now 
time for the leadership of this country to do ours.

[[Page 1123]]

    I ask you only to remember here the lessons you have learned here 
and the lessons which have already been repeated. Nobody can create for 
you an opportunity you are not capable of seizing. If you don't continue 
to learn throughout a lifetime, you can still be left behind. And nobody 
in this country can fully succeed until more of this country succeeds. 
We do not walk alone. We walk as families, as communities, as 
neighborhoods, and as a nation, and we had better start acting like it. 
We are going up or down together, and we need to go forward.
    In 1960, in November, President Kennedy delivered the last speech of 
his Presidential campaign here in the Boston Garden. He talked of, I 
quote, ``the contest between the comfortable and the concerned, between 
those who believe we should rest and lie at anchor and drift and those 
who want to move this country forward.'' That contest is not over, and 
it never will be. But at each critical juncture in our Nation's history, 
whether we go forward will depend upon whether a new generation of 
Americans are willing to take up that challenge laid down 33 years ago 
by President Kennedy.
    One of the most distinguished citizens Massachusetts ever produced 
was Oliver Wendell Holmes. He joined the Massachusetts infantry during 
the Civil War, and he lived to have a conversation with President 
Franklin Roosevelt 60 years later. Holmes said that a person must be 
involved in the action and passion of his time for fear of being judged 
not to have lived. Well, my fellow Americans, the action and passion of 
your time is to restore the American dream and to make it real for 
everyone who is willing to do what you have done in coming here today.
    When I was in college--and I just celebrated my 25th reunion--I had 
a remarkable teacher who said that the most important idea in our 
culture was the idea that the future could be better than the present 
and that each of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.
    And I tell you, when I walked down that aisle today and I saw your 
enthusiasm, your energy, your intelligence, your love for life, your 
excitement today, I thought to myself, you deserve that. You deserve 
that. But only you can provide it. And so I say to you today, let us 
all, from the President to the students, to the parents, to every person 
who works in this great land, resolve to do our part to make sure that 
we have exercised our personal moral responsibility to make your future 
better than the present.
    God bless you, and good luck.

Note: The President spoke at 10:55 a.m. in the Boston Garden. In his 
remarks, he referred to John A. Curry, president of the university, and 
Douglas Luffborough III, student commencement speaker.