[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 44 (Monday, November 8, 1993)]
[Pages 2232-2234]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Signing the Executive Order on Historically Black Colleges 
and Universities

 November 1, 1993

    Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, Secretary Riley. Ladies and 
gentlemen, it's a great pleasure for me to be here today with my 
longtime friend chancellor Vic Hackley and with so many of the 
distinguished persons in the audience: Dr. Sam Myers; Dr. Joyce Payne; 
our longtime friend Bill Gray; Dr. James Cheek, we're glad to see you 
here; Dr. Art Thomas; General Alonzo Short is

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here, I'm glad to see you, General Short; and Mr. Emmett Paige, the 
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, and Intelligence. 
And I also know that in addition to the Members of Congress already 
introduced, Congressman Bobby Scott from Virginia just came in. 
Somewhere he's standing; I saw him. Thank you for coming.
    Now, since the Vice President was so parochial--[laughter]--I have 
four people here I want to introduce: my friends Dr. William Keaton, 
from Arkansas Baptist College, in the back there; Dr. Katherine Mitchell 
from Shorter College, I saw Katherine over here; Dr. Lawrence Davis, 
from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff; and Dr. Myer Titus from 
Philander Smith College, where I used to run every day in my former 
life.
    I am so glad to see all of you here. For 130 years the institutions 
you represent have been beacons of hope and opportunity for Americans 
for whom no other options existed. You have nurtured young minds. You 
have built self-esteem. You've educated some of our Nation's foremost 
scholars and leaders. When Thurgood Marshall was refused admittance to 
the University of Maryland Law School because of the color of his skin, 
it was Howard University Law School that prepared him for the challenge, 
for the United States Supreme Court. Seventeen Members of the United 
States Congress are graduates of historically black institutions of 
higher education, as well as one United States Senator who is not an 
African-American, Senator Harris Wofford from Pennsylvania, a graduate 
of Howard Law School.
    Martin Luther King's way to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Prize 
was, as the Vice President said, plainly paved by the fact that he was a 
Morehouse man. The rhythms of my friend Toni Morrison's writings, which 
garnered her this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, are rooted in her 
study of classics and literature at Howard University.
    In seeking the best and most skilled Americans to serve here in our 
administration, graduates from historically black colleges and 
universities have been a part of our team. Energy Secretary Hazel 
O'Leary and the Assistant to the President for Public Liaison, Alexis 
Herman, are Xavier graduates. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and Under 
Secretary Bob Nash attended Howard. Our Surgeon General, Joycelyn 
Elders, was a graduate of Philander Smith. Sarah Summerville, my Alabama 
campaign coordinator and now at the Department of Defense, attended both 
Mississippi Industrial and Miles Colleges. And there are many more.
    The Executive order I sign today and all the education initiatives 
that Secretary Riley discussed have to do with change, preserving 
educational institutions and ensuring that every young person in this 
country who wants to get a college education has the opportunity to do 
it and finding new ways to get people into college and into training 
programs and to help them succeed once they're there.
    Since the average person will change jobs seven times in a lifetime, 
and the 1990 census makes it crystal clear the very harsh economic 
consequences of not having at least 2 years of post-high school 
education, we know we have much to do. This year we have begun already 
by reorganizing the student loan programs to cut their costs of 
overhead, to lower the interest rates, to change the repayment terms so 
that young people can now borrow money without fear of being bankrupted 
in paying the loans back. Now young people can borrow the money at lower 
interest rates and then elect to pay them back as a percentage of their 
incomes, without regard to the amount of the loan, so that no one will 
ever be discouraged from borrowing the money and, even more important 
perhaps, from taking a job after college which might not be a high-
paying job but which might do an awful lot of good for our society, a 
job in our inner cities as a teacher perhaps or working in a program to 
help our young people. I'm very proud of the changes that we made in the 
student loan program, and I thank Secretary Riley for his outstanding 
leadership in that regard.
    We have also passed the national service program which will give, 
over the next 3 to 4 years, up to 100,000 young Americans a chance to 
earn some credit against their college education and help to serve their 
communities at the grassroots level, to rebuild lives and to build their 
own minds in the process.
    The Goals 2000 legislation, which Secretary Riley mentioned and to 
which the Vice

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President alluded, will forge a new partnership between our National 
Government and States and communities to set some meaningful national 
standards about what our young people should know, because we know that 
they're going to be competing in a global economy, and they're entitled 
to have a shot at the best we have to offer.
    With this Executive order and working in close cooperation with 
Secretary Riley and Catherine LeBlanc, the Executive Director of the 
White House Initiative Office, we'll expand the opportunities for 
participation in Federal programs. Ultimately, we'll strengthen the 
capacity of historically black colleges and universities to provide 
quality education. Within the next few days, I'll announce my 
appointments to the Presidential Advisory Board on Historically Black 
Colleges and Universities and will ask my longtime friend and the former 
chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Vic Hackley, now 
at Fayetteville State University, to serve as the Chair.
    I want to say a special word of thanks to the current board, which 
was appointed by President Bush, for their service and commitment and 
especially to Dr. James Cheek for his leadership. And I thank you, Dr. 
Cheek, for what you have done.
    I'd like to close by mentioning a very disturbing article that 
appeared in the morning paper here. You may have seen it, about children 
in our Nation's Capital, not even teenagers, discussing their own 
funerals, planning their funerals, thinking about what they would wear 
and what music they hope would be played. I am profoundly concerned as 
we take up the debate this week on the crime bill, on the Brady bill, on 
the establishment of boot camps as alternatives to prison for young 
people, on trying to get more law enforcement officers on our streets, 
that we not underestimate the gravity of the task before us. Somehow we 
have to get those young people to you, and through you, to the world.
    I know this is a difficult, frustrating, perplexing time. Every day 
the Vice President and I start the morning together talking about 
problems that have no easy solution. But I know that this ought to be a 
time of immense celebration and hopefulness for the American people with 
the end of the cold war, with the receding threat of nuclear 
annihilation, with the clear evidence that, for all of our problems, our 
economy is doing better than the other wealthy countries in creating 
jobs and promoting growth and that there is so much out there for us 
still to do.
    But the truth is that we are squandering our most valuable resource, 
our young people, at a rate that no other nation would tolerate. We 
permit so many of them to grow up without the basic supports of family 
and community. We permit many of them to live in circumstances, frankly, 
more dangerous than those experienced by people we go halfway around the 
world to protect. And so many of them, by the time they are old enough 
for you to get ahold of them, aren't there for you to get hold of.
    I say that not to end this on a down moment but to remind you of 
just how important this is, what you are doing. A lot of these kids 
still won't have a chance if you don't do your job well. And we have to 
find a way for you to reach them at an even earlier point. And if we 
want to make it, we've got to find a way to remind the rest of America 
that we are really all in this together. We cannot afford to have 11-
year-olds thinking about their funerals. They need to be thinking about 
their children. You can do that.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:38 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive 
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Sam Myers, president, 
National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education; Joyce 
Payne, director, Office for the Advancement of Public Black Colleges; 
William H. Gray III, CEO and president, United Negro College Fund; Art 
Thomas, former chairman, National Association for Equal Opportunity in 
Higher Education; and Lt. Gen. Alonzo E. Short, Jr., USA, Director, 
Defense Information Systems Agency. Following his remarks, the President 
signed the Executive order.