[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 17 (Monday, May 1, 1995)]
[Pages 710-714]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to Students at Iowa State University in Ames

April 25, 1995

    Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, for your stirring 
speech. He tells all those jokes, and then he goes about disproving them 
with his speech. [Laughter] Thank you for your service to America. When 
the history of our administration is written, there may be differing 
opinions about the quality of the decisions that I have made, but no one 
will doubt that the right thing was done in naming Albert Gore Vice 
President and then providing him the opportunity to be the most 
influential Vice President in American history.
    I also want to thank my friend Tom Harkin for being here with me and 
for what he said and for his heroic efforts in the United States Senate 
on behalf of the people of Iowa and the people of this country. Whether 
they are farmers or people in rural areas, students, or the disabled, he 
is always there. I'd also like to say that I know Tom lived here for a 
while with his wonderful wife, Ruth, who was once the county attorney 
here in this county. She is now the head of the Overseas Private 
Investment Corporation. And she has done more to create American jobs by 
financing international trade than any person who ever held her 
position. And you can be proud of her as well.
    I want to thank Mayor Curtis for welcoming me here to Ames. I was 
looking forward to meeting Mayor Curtis, but to be fair, I'm such a big 
basketball fan, I was hoping to meet the other ``Mayor'' here as well. 
If I could shoot like that, I'd still be in the NBA; I wouldn't be up 
here today. [Laughter] And thank you, President Jischke, and all of you 
at Iowa State for making us feel so welcomed. I thank the band for 
playing. And I'm glad they provided seats for you to see the event. When 
I used to play at things like this, they never gave us a seat, so I'm 
glad to see your smiling faces. And thank you, singers, for singing and 
for looking so wonderful up there.
    Ladies and gentlemen, we had a wonderful rural meeting today, and I 
want to talk a little bit about that. But before I do, I want to thank 
all of you who have come up to me already today and expressed your 
sympathy with and support for the people in Oklahoma City. There was a 
sign over there--show me that sign you all waved. I want everyone to see 
that. It says, ``Oklahoma City, Iowa Cares.''
    You may know that this is National Service Week in the United 
States, and today is our first annual National Day of Service. That's 
why I'm so glad to see all the young AmeriCorps members here doing their 
work.
    I know that all of you are thinking about how we can serve and help 
the people of Oklahoma City as they work through the next stages of 
their tragedy. I can tell you that when Hillary and I were there on 
Sunday, we saw people who had not slept, who were working heroically, 
some at considerable risk to themselves, to try to clean out the last

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measure of the wreckage and to try to find those who are still 
unaccounted for, working in the hospitals, working on the streets. The 
police and firemen--many of them had not seen their families for days.
    The response of our country to this bombing shows what a strong 
country we are when we pull together. I saw it when you had the 500-year 
flood here. And I thought all the top soil was going to be somewhere in 
the Gulf of Mexico before it got through raining. But I really saw it 
down there in the face of this terrible madness that those fine people 
have endured.
    We must take away from this experience a lot of things. But we must 
never forget that it was a terrible thing. I will do all I can to make 
sure that we see the wheels of justice grind rapidly, certainly, fairly, 
but severely. But we must take away from this--[applause]--we must take 
away from this incident a renewed determination to stand up for the 
fundamental constitutional rights of Americans, including the right to 
freedom of speech. We have to remember that freedom of speech has 
endured in our country for over two centuries. The first amendment, with 
its freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, 
is in many ways the most important part of what makes us Americans. But 
we have endured because we have exercised that freedom with 
responsibility and discipline.
    That is what we celebrate when people come to the rural heart of 
America and talk about what can be done to develop it. And every speaker 
says, what a shame it would be if we continue to allow economic decline 
in rural America, where the values of work and family and community and 
mutual responsibility are alive and well.
    I ask you on this National Day of Service to think of a personal 
service you can all render. Yes, stand up for freedom of speech. Yes, 
stand up for all of our freedoms, the freedom of assembly, the freedom 
to bear arms, all the freedoms we have. But remember this: with 
freedom--if the country is to survive and do well--comes responsibility. 
And that means--[applause]--that means even as others discharge their 
freedom of speech, if we think they are being irresponsible, then we 
have the duty to stand up and say so to protect our own freedom of 
speech. That is our responsibility.
    Words have consequences. To pretend that they do not is idle. Did 
Patrick Henry stand up and say, ``Give me liberty or give me death,'' 
expecting it to fall on deaf ears and impact no one? Did Thomas 
Jefferson write, ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 
are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,'' 
did he say that thinking the words would vanish in thin air and have no 
consequences? Of course not. Are you here in this great university 
because you think the words you stay up late at night reading, studying, 
have no consequence? Of course not.
    We know that words have consequences. And so I say to you, even as 
we defend the right of people to speak freely and to say things with 
which we devoutly disagree, we must stand up and speak against reckless 
speech that can push fragile people over the edge, beyond the boundaries 
of civilized conduct, to take this country into a dark place.
    I say that, no matter where it comes from, people are encouraging 
violence and lawlessness and hatred. If people are encouraging conduct 
that will undermine the fabric of this country, it should be spoken 
against whether it comes from the left or the right, whether it comes on 
radio, television, or in the movies, whether it comes in the schoolyard, 
or, yes, even on the college campus. The answer to hateful speech is to 
speak out against it in the American spirit, to speak up for freedom and 
responsibility.
    That is so important to me, especially for all of you young people. 
I was so pleased to see at the National Rural Conference today so many 
young people, people who want to make their lives in rural America, 
people who want to believe that we can make economic opportunity come 
alive in rural America, that people can actually work and raise their 
families and children there and make a living and be good, fulfilled 
citizens there.
    I was encouraged by that. After all, most of us in this country who 
make the speeches and make the decisions have lived most of our lives. 
We have already lived the Amer- 

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ican dream. We are here in positions--your university president, your 
Senator, the Vice President, and I--we're here because of what America 
has already given us.
    If they took it all away from us tomorrow, we would have had more 
than 99.999 percent of the people who ever lived in all of human 
history. It is for those of you who still have your lives before you 
that we must most urgently work to keep the American dream alive.
    When I assumed this office, I told the American people that I 
thought we had two great responsibilities standing on the verge of a new 
century. One was to keep the American dream alive for all of our people, 
that if you work hard and play by the rules you should have a chance to 
live up to the fullest of your God-given capacities. And the second was 
to make sure that our country remained the world's strongest force for 
peace and freedom and democracy, so that we could operate in a world 
where people competed based on what was in their minds and their spirit 
and what they did with their hands and not what they did with their 
weapons. And we have pursued those courses with a vengeance.
    If you look at where we are now after 2 years, in terms of our 
objectives, to restore economic growth, to grow the middle class and 
shrink the under class, to help to rebuild the bonds of society by 
strengthening work and family and the sense of security the American 
people have, to give us a Government that costs less but works better, 
and to help people do more to help themselves, it is clear that much has 
been done but much, much more is still there to do.
    The deficit is down. Trade has been expanded. We have the lowest 
unemployment and inflation rates combined in 25 years. We are moving 
ahead in so many ways to make our people more secure, more police on our 
street in rural areas and in cities and no Russian missiles pointed at 
the people of the United States for the first time since the dawn of the 
nuclear age.
    But make no mistake about it, my fellow Americans, this is an 
unusual time--different from past times. The global economy, the 
revolution in technology, the changing patterns of work, all of these 
things, all of these things have created a situation in which we are 
able to create large numbers of jobs in the United States. In Iowa, the 
unemployment rate the last time I checked was 3.3 percent--large numbers 
of jobs where people do not have an increase in their income or increase 
in their sense of job security.
    So you have this unusual circumstance today with the economy 
growing, the deficit going down, all the indicators seeming to point us 
in the right direction, and more than half of the adults in America are 
working harder for the same or lower wages they were making 10 years 
ago.
    That is the challenge to America today. It is a challenge faced by 
every advanced country faced with foreign competition, faced with 
technology, faced with all the changes you know well about. But it is a 
special challenge in America because there is more inequality here than 
in most other wealthy countries, and yet, we are the country that values 
the American dream. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, if you work 
hard and do your best to develop your ability, you will be rewarded. And 
so I say to you: That is our challenge, to reward people who make the 
effort you are making by being here today in this great university and 
all others in America who are willing to work.
    So I ask you to think of just this point--there are so many issues 
to discuss and we talked about a lot of them today--but here I ask you 
to think of only this: What is the role of education? The middle class 
in America, my fellow Americans, is splitting apart today. Something we 
have not known since the end of the Second World War where inequality is 
increasing among Americans with jobs. It is splitting apart, and the 
fault line is education. Why? Because in a global economy, where new 
technologies are always changing the nature of work, what we can earn 
depends on what we can learn. More than ever before, the prospects of 
people all across our country are determined by whether they have enough 
education to learn and learn and learn and whether there is available to 
them a system to keep learning for a lifetime.
    Therefore, I say to you, as you hear the debates that are about to 
resume in the Congress about the Government deficit--yes, we

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have a deficit, it's a lot smaller than it was when we showed up 2 years 
ago and it's going down some more, but it's still there. But the budget 
deficit is not the only deficit we have. We also have an education 
deficit, and you have millions and millions and millions of Americans 
who go home every night and sit down across the table and look at their 
wives or their husbands and their children and wonder whether they have 
failed, because as hard as they work, they cannot make it in the modern 
economy. And I tell you, the only way to turn that around is to 
revolutionize the availability and the quality of education to all of 
our people, without regard to their race, their income, their region, or 
their age. This should lead us to a clear conclusion. With a budget 
deficit and an education deficit, we cannot solve one at the expense of 
the other without hurting our country for a long time to come. We cannot 
back off of our commitment to education.
    There are proposals in the Congress today to require students to 
begin paying interest on their student loans while they're still in 
school. That will increase the cost of education, reduce the number of 
people who would take student loans. Over the long run, it would reduce 
the number of people successfully completing their education. We ought 
to be cutting the cost of education to our young people, not increasing 
it, to get more people in and through college.
    There are proposals to limit, and some even want to outright 
eliminate, the National Service Program. They say, ``Oh, well, it's not 
necessary.''
    Look at what is going on in rural Iowa. Look at what these young 
people are doing. Yes, they're earning money for a college education, 
but they're also doing things all across America to immunize children, 
to build housing for the elderly, to walk streets and keep them safer 
for all of our people, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things to 
build community in America. We should not eliminate it; we should have 
more young people getting their education through the National Service 
Program.
    So our program is very different. We say, yes, reduce the deficit, 
but increase Head Start. Give our public schools--[applause]--give our 
public schools more funds to meet national standards of excellence, to 
have computers in every rural school, to do the things that are 
necessary to open up educational opportunities to all of our children. 
We say, invest the small amount of money it would take to enable every 
State in the country to have apprenticeship programs to help the young 
people who don't go to college but do want to get some education and 
training after high school so they could be in good jobs, not dead-end 
jobs. We say make available to every university and college in America 
the direct student loan program, which is now available here at Iowa 
State which cuts the cost of lending to the students, which cuts the 
bureaucratic hassle to the colleges and to the students, and which saves 
the taxpayers money.
    If the Congress wants to know how to reduce the deficit and increase 
education, the answer is, don't give in to the special interest lobby 
seeking to limit the availability of direct loans. Let every school in 
the country have the option to do what we've done here. Let these young 
people get lower cost loans with better repayment terms direct from the 
Government. Cut out the middle man. You will reduce the deficit, 
increase the number of college loans, increase the number of students, 
and move this country into the future. That is the right answer for this 
problem.
    And finally, let me say, with all this talk of tax cuts, remember we 
have two deficits. There should be no tax cut if it's going to increase 
the deficit. No tax cut should be adopted except in the context of 
reducing the deficit. It should be modest. It should be targeted to 
middle class people who need it. And I believe it should be targeted to 
education--a deduction for the cost of education after high school to 
Americans all across this country. That is the right kind of tax cut.
    One of your distinguished alumni, George Washington Carver, said it 
best when he said--[applause]--when he said, ``Education is the key to 
unlock the golden door of freedom.'' Well, when he said it, he was 
thinking of personal freedom, personal opportunity, individual 
opportunity.
    But those of us who are here, your president, your Senator, the Vice 
President, and I, we benefited from a new insight about education 
because we were raised in the

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aftermath of World War II. We were raised by a generation of people who 
in return for their service in the war were given the benefits of the GI 
bill. And guess what? It didn't just give individual opportunity and 
personal freedom to all those people. It exploded the possibilities of 
America. And we grew up in the most prosperous country the world had 
ever known because of millions and millions and millions of people 
getting individual opportunity.
    Now, I can tell you with absolute certainty, even in the face of all 
the difficulties and complexities of the modern world, that education is 
more important to the future of all of us as Americans today than it was 
to America at the end of the Second World War when the GI bill was 
adopted.
    So yes, let us continue to fight to tame the beast of the Government 
deficit. You should know the budget would be balanced today were it not 
for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up between 1981 and 
1992. But we have to do better. We have to do better.
    But as we do it, let us do it in a way that increases our commitment 
to and our investment in education because that is the selfish thing to 
do as well as the selfless thing to do. Believe me, folks, if I could 
wave a magic wand and do two things to ensure the future of America so 
that I would know it wouldn't matter who was elected to any office, it 
would be these things: I would give every child a childhood in a stable 
family and guarantee every American a good education. That should be our 
mission. There would be no poverty, great hope, and an unlimited future 
if that could be done.
    Lastly, let me say this: In Washington, the rhetoric often becomes 
too political and extremely partisan. What we heard today at this rural 
conference, we heard from Republicans and Democrats and independents. We 
heard people talking about the real problems of real people: How can a 
family make a living on the farm? What should be in the new farm bill to 
allow people to have other kinds of economic development in rural areas? 
How can we relieve the stress on families where, between the mother and 
father together, they may have three or four jobs and not enough time to 
be with the children? How can we guarantee the benefits of technology, 
access to health care, transportation for the elderly, decent middle 
class housing in rural areas?
    And these things were discussed in practical, common sense, old-
fashioned American language so that at the end of the day, no one knew, 
having heard it all, what they heard from a Republican, what they heard 
from the Democrat, who these people voted for in the last election. Why? 
Because they were talking about the real stuff of life, not words used 
to divide people.
    So I ask you to remember this: We'll always have our fair share of 
politics in the Nation's Capital, and the further away you get from the 
real lives of real people, the more partisan the rhetoric tends to 
become. But you, you, in this great university and in this community can 
have a huge influence in saying, ``Put one thing beyond politics. Do not 
sacrifice the future of our education on the altar of indiscriminate 
budget cutting. Reduce the deficit in the budget, reduce the deficit in 
education, give the next generation of Americans the American dream.''
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 4:10 p.m. at the Hilton Coliseum. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mayor Larry R. Curtis of Ames, IA; Fred ``The 
Mayor'' Hoiberg, Iowa State University basketball player; and Martin C. 
Jischke, president, Iowa State University.