[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 20 (Monday, May 20, 1996)]
[Pages 835-842]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Pennsylvania State University Graduate School 
Commencement in State College, Pennsylvania

May 10, 1996

    Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that very 
warm welcome. Thank you, President Spanier. Thank you, Mr. Arnelle, Dr. 
Brighton, Dr. Erickson, Mr. Hollander. I thank the University Brass for 
playing so well for me. It made me want to take them back to the White 
House.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to be here for many very 
personal reasons, many of which are obvious. I'm very honored to receive 
the University Scholars Medal and to be the first non-Penn State alumnus 
to receive it.
    As it was said earlier, my family has a long history with this State 
and with this great university. Hillary's family is from Scranton and 
both my father-in-law and brother-in-law attended Penn State and both 
played football here. Back in the thirties, according to my father-in-
law, he had to play offense and defense. [Laughter] That's sort of what 
I do, so I understand that. [Laughter]
    I have had some other good personal associations with this 
university, and for all those I am very grateful. I am grateful for the 
establishment of a scholarship at the college of education in my late 
father-in-law's name. It means a great deal to my wife and to me and to 
our daughter. And I am grateful to be here because of what Penn State 
represents.
    This school was made a land-grant school in the darkest hours of our 
Nation's history, because President Lincoln and his contemporaries knew 
even then that our Nation's future depended upon the widest possible 
dispersion of knowledge. Though faced with the possibility of the very 
union of our States breaking up, our leaders were still thinking about 
the future. And to all the graduates here with advanced degrees, I say, 
a great nation must always be thinking about tomorrow. Therefore, even 
as you relish this day, I ask you to join me just for a few moments in 
thinking about tomorrow, for you will live a great deal of your lives in 
the 21st century, the most remarkable age of possibility in human 
history.
    I have been told that today every student at Penn State is given an 
E-mail account and that more than one million E-mail messages are sent 
every day. That is just a taste of the world to come, a dazzling, new 
global economy, giving more and more people a chance to work with their 
minds instead of their backs throughout a career, many of you in jobs 
that you have not even invented yet. You will have incredible choices in 
where you live and how you work. You will be able to raise your children 
in greater peace and freedom and in the most diverse and vibrant 
democracy history has ever known. At least that's what I want our 
country to be like as we move into the 21st century.
    Almost 5 years ago at my alma mater, Georgetown, I gave three 
speeches about my vision of America's future in the 21st century and a 
strategy for how I thought we ought to achieve that future. I said then 
and I'd like to repeat now that my vision is pretty simple and 
straightforward: I want an America in which all Americans, without 
regard to their race or their gender or their station in life, who are 
willing to work hard have a chance to live out their dreams. I want an 
America that remains the world's strongest force for peace and freedom 
and prosperity. And I want an America that is no longer being driven 
apart by our differences but instead is coming together around our 
shared values and respect for our diversity.
    As my wife says in her book, I really believe it takes a village of 
all of our people working together to make the most of our lives. To 
build that kind of America, we have to be able to honestly meet our 
challenges

[[Page 836]]

and protect our values. We have to find ways to create these 
opportunities for all Americans. We have to find ways to build strong 
communities. And we have got to find ways to get more personal 
responsibility from all of our citizens. Opportunity, responsibility, 
community: these are values that have made our country strong, that have 
built great institutions like Penn State, that guide my actions as 
President. I believe they must guide our Nation as we prepare for the 
tomorrows of the 21st century.
    What I want to do here and in the other commencement addresses I 
will be making is to talk about what has occurred in the last 4 years 
and, even more importantly, what must still occur if we are going to 
realize this vision, to give opportunities to everybody willing to work 
for them, to keep our country the strongest force for peace and freedom, 
and to rebuild our sense of unity and community around a shared ethic of 
responsibility.
    Compared to 4 years ago, there is clearly more opportunity, a much 
lower deficit, increased access to education, a renewed commitment to a 
clean environment and safer streets, 8\1/2\ million new jobs, low 
inflation, record numbers of new exports in businesses. But we all know 
there are also a lot of problems in this new economy, a lot of 
uncertainty, and much more to do to give all our people a chance to 
succeed.
    Compared to 4 years ago the world is more peaceful and safer. The 
nuclear threat has diminished. Peace and freedom are taking hold from 
Haiti to South Africa to Northern Ireland to Bosnia to the Middle East. 
But there is a lot more to do to make the American people safe from the 
21st century threats of terrorism, organized crime and drug-running, 
weapons proliferation and global environmental threats.
    In future speeches I'll discuss both these things at greater length. 
Today I'd like to ask you to kind of travel along with me as we look at 
America's present and its future in terms of that third objective: 
inspiring a stronger, more united American community, rooted in a 
greater commitment to personal responsibility and community service.
    What you have done here today is in and of itself an act of 
responsibility. By getting this advanced degree you have honored 
yourselves and your families, and you have helped America. We need more 
people--many, many more people--with much higher levels of education 
and, even more importantly, with the developed ability to learn for a 
lifetime. We need this kind of personal responsibility from all of our 
citizens, doing the best to make the most of their own lives. And we 
must apply the lessons of your success as individuals to our common work 
as a nation.
    I believe we are living through a period of most profound change in 
the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to each other and 
the rest of the world in 100 years, since we moved from the agricultural 
into the industrial age. At the turn of the century, about 100 years 
ago, people who for generations had lived their lives by the rising and 
the setting of the Sun moved from the country to the city, where they 
woke to the din of the streetcar and went home to the sound of the 
factory whistle. That time presented enormous opportunities but also 
great challenges. A hundred years ago, many people's lives were uprooted 
but not improved. And for many, not only their livelihoods but the 
values by which they lived were threatened by the changes of the day.
    In response to the challenges of that time, a gifted generation of 
reformers, led first by Theodore Roosevelt and then by Woodrow Wilson, 
worked to harness the power of our Nation's Government so that it could 
extend the benefits of the industrial era to all Americans, curb the 
excesses of the era, and enable our people to preserve their family and 
community values. They launched what we now call the Progressive Era. 
They brought us the antitrust laws, the child protection laws, the 
earliest environment protection laws. They were all designed to harness 
the positive forces of the new age to give everyone a fair chance to 
protect the values of the American people.
    Think what has happened in the 100 years since. The progressives 
built the foundation of what became known as the American Century, a 
century in which America won two World Wars and the cold war, overcame 
the Great Depression, achieved decades of sustained economic growth, 
scientific breakthroughs, more opportunities for women and

[[Page 837]]

minorities, a cleaner environment, remarkable security and good health 
for senior citizens, and the largest and most prosperous middle class in 
human history. It all began in the Progressive Era.
    Today we're living through another time of profound change. Like the 
dawn of the industrial age, the information age offers vast new 
opportunities. Today technology and information are dominating every 
form of work including agriculture, as I'm sure anyone in the college of 
agriculture here can attest to.
    But this time also presents great challenges, people whose lives are 
uprooted but not improved and cherished values strained by the pace and 
the scope of change. I'd like to talk about that a little today.
    When I was growing up, Americans could pretty much walk the streets 
of any city without fear of being hurt by violent crime. Having children 
out of wedlock was rare and a source of shame. Welfare was a temporary 
weigh station for widows and their orphans. It was far from a perfect 
time, the forties and fifties and early sixties. Women and minorities 
didn't have the opportunities they have today. But in neighborhoods all 
across America, people knew it when you were born, cared about you while 
you lived, and missed you when you died.
    For too many young people growing up today, that world exists only 
in black and white reruns on television. In our toughest neighborhoods 
and our meanest streets, we've seen a stunning and simultaneous 
breakdown of community, family, and work, the heart and soul of a 
civilized society. We've seen a buildup of crime and gangs and drugs, as 
young people turn to things that will destroy them, ultimately, in part 
because they are raising themselves without enough to say yes to.
    We've seen so much of this now we've almost become numb to it. A lot 
of us may even be resigned to it. But I want to ask you to think today 
about what you want America to look like in the 21st century, and I want 
you to say to yourself, ``I refuse to accept this as a normal and 
unavoidable and irreversible condition. I believe we can mend our social 
fabric. We've done it before, and we have to do it today.''
    If we're moving into an era in which we will be judged and our 
success will be determined by how well we use our minds, we must first 
be able to function as orderly, law-abiding, decent human beings. We 
have to, in short, not only meet the changes of the day but reaffirm our 
enduring values.
    In this, to be sure, our Government still has a role to play. But 
it's not the same role that Government had to play in the beginning of 
the 20th century because the problems are different. The world of today 
has moved away from big, centralized bureaucracies and top-down 
solutions, so has your Federal Government. Indeed, there are 240,000 
fewer people working for the United States Government today than there 
were the day I became President of this great country.
    But we still need a Government that is strong enough to give people 
the tools they need to make the most of their own lives, to enable them 
to seize opportunities when they are responsible. That's why I have 
fought so hard for things like the student loan programs, the Pell grant 
programs, the scholarship programs, the research programs, because we 
cannot, on the one hand, tell the American people, go out and be 
responsible, and on the other hand, jerk the rug out from under them. We 
have to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own 
lives.
    And whenever we fight for a strong economy or a clean environment or 
safe streets or investment in research and technology or give a child a 
chance with the Head Start program, we are doing nothing more or less 
than giving people an environment in which they still have to make the 
most of their own lives.
    And so what I ask you today is to think about that. What is the role 
of the individual citizen in making the America of our dreams in the 
21st century? What is the role of the individual citizen in making sure 
that we will move into this global society, with everyone having the 
chance to live up to his or her dreams? It is clear to me that 
Government alone cannot solve this problem.
    If you look at any society's most fundamental requirements, strong 
families and safe streets, and you ask yourselves, what are all

[[Page 838]]

the causes for the stresses on those things in our country, you may come 
up with a whole laundry list of things that Government can do about 
them. I know I have. But in your heart of hearts you know that many, 
many of the things from which we suffer are caused by the lack of 
personal responsibility on the part of millions of American citizens, 
the teen mother who leaves school for a life on welfare, a father who 
walks away from or abuses a family, a criminal who preys upon the rest 
of us, the neighbors who turn their backs upon the children in need.
    I say to you we cannot tolerate this anymore if you really want your 
vision of the 21st century to become real. We have to be willing to give 
people a chance to escape lives that are destructive for them and costly 
for the rest of us. That is our responsibility. But we must also insist 
that people help themselves and assume responsibility for making their 
own lives and the life of this great Nation better.
    If you just take the welfare system, for example, you can see the 
point I'm trying to make. I took office believing that a lot of people 
on welfare were dying to get off it and were trapped in it. I still 
believe that. It's a system that is too weighted toward a lifetime of 
dependency instead of demanding responsibility, too willing to let 
fathers bring children into the world, turn their backs and walk away 
and load all the burden onto the young mothers who are left behind, too 
willing to give the young mothers a check to move out on their own if 
they have a child instead of staying at home, staying in school, and 
strengthening the family.
    For 15 years, going back to my service as Governor, I have sat in 
welfare offices, talked to people on welfare, asked them what it would 
take to turn their lives around, asked them what had happened. I have 
worked to reform and change welfare from a system that encourages 
dependency to one that encourages independence, from one that does not 
encourage work to one that insists upon work but also supports 
responsible parenting.
    If you look at all these people here with their advanced degrees, 
why are we so proud of them? Because we believe they will be able to 
succeed not only in the world of work but they will be good role models 
for the American society. Their children will be able to succeed. They 
will be able to look at their children and their children will be able 
to look at them, and they will be able to do great things together. That 
is what we should want for people on welfare, the simple ability to 
succeed at work and to succeed at home, to be able to contribute their 
portion of the American dream.
    Now, in the past 3 years, by executive actions, we've been working 
on what the New York Times called ``a quiet revolution on welfare.'' 
We've cut redtape for 37 States and now let 75 percent of the people in 
this country on welfare be a part of welfare reform experiments with 
little fanfare and no new legislation. We've done things like impose 
time limits and require work, and we've worked much harder to enforce 
the National Government's role in child support enforcement across 
national lines.
    And you know what? The welfare rolls have dropped by more than a 
million. The food stamp rolls are down by a million and a half. Child 
support collections are up 40 percent to $11 billion a year. And the 
teen pregnancy rate has even started to go down a bit.
    What does all this have to do with you? They are part of your 
country. If their children wind up in your prisons, you will pay for 
them instead of investing more money in scientific laboratories at Penn 
State or giving children a chance to work in a program to earn a 
scholarship or otherwise building our future. When others regularly and 
systematically violate the values we all say we share, it weakens 
America, and it weakens the future of your vision and your dreams.
    We still have a lot to do. Nearly a third of our babies today are 
born out of wedlock; a whole lot of them end up on welfare. A few days 
ago, we took an action which should force more responsibility. Every 
State will have to require teen mothers to stay in school and to sign a 
personal responsibility contract and to stay at home unless the 
environment is abusive, so that they must work to turn their lives 
around if they want to keep those benefits.
    I'm still working with Members of Congress in both parties to pass 
legislation to overhaul the entire welfare system. And I

[[Page 839]]

hope we can do it even though this is an election year. There's really 
no call for a work stoppage, and by the time November comes around 
you'll have more politics than you can stand. Meanwhile, we ought to be 
working to give those people what we want for ourselves: independence, 
work, and responsible parenting.
    But what I want to say to all of you--you say, ``Well, what's that 
got to do with me? I'll never be on welfare; I've got a Ph.D. today.'' 
[Laughter] They are your fellow Americans. Those children are your 
future. And what I want to say is, it doesn't matter what laws we pass 
or what programs we put in place, we cannot reverse decades and patterns 
of behavior unless more of our citizens are willing to take some 
responsibility for other people's kids in the near-term.
    We have to inspire our communities to support programs and adults to 
participate in programs that we know now will dramatically reduce teen 
pregnancy. They're out there; they're just not in every community. The 
hard truth is, too many of our young people don't have the kind of 
discipline or love, guidance or support that it takes to grow up into 
responsible adults. Church groups and neighbors and parents all need to 
send a clear message to all children, not just their own: We care about 
you, but you have to take care of yourself. Don't get pregnant or father 
a child until you're ready to take responsibility. But if you do, we'll 
help you as long as you are responsible. And you can't walk away from 
that responsibility. If you do, we'll make you assume it.
    Let me say that, in addition to welfare, I have the same view of the 
crime problem, and it's remarkably similar. Only if we take 
responsibility for our own communities can we really achieve our 
objective in crime. We'll never thoroughly transform human nature, but 
even if you have a Ph.D., you don't want to be a victim of a crime; you 
don't want your children to be unsafe going to and from school; you 
don't want to have to worry your heart out if your kids drive to a city 
to see a play; you don't want to have any kind of country other than one 
of which crime is an exception.
    Someone said to me the other day, ``Mr. President, you talk about 
all this all the time, but you will never eliminate crime.'' I said, 
``That's not my goal. My goal is to create an America so that when 
people turn on the evening news and they see a report of a serious 
crime, they are surprised and shocked, instead of yawning about it.''
    Now, there are things that Government can do. There are things that 
Government can do. In 1994, we passed a crime bill and a Brady bill. The 
Brady bill has already stopped 60,000 felons and fugitives with criminal 
records from getting handguns--60,000. We took 19 deadly assault weapons 
off the street, and not a single hunter in Pennsylvania or in my native 
State of Arkansas missed a deer season or a duck season or had to have a 
different weapon. They didn't lose anything.
    We said to repeat violent criminals, ``three strikes and you're 
out.'' We said, ``If you kill law enforcement officials, the death 
penalty is there.'' But we also said what every police officer in 
America knows, the best way to fight crime is to reach young people 
before they turn to crime in the first place. [Applause]
    Now, you all clap for that, but if you believe it, what it means is 
that you cannot leave the work of making our streets safe to the police 
alone. Citizens have the responsibility. Citizens have a responsibility. 
You can take advantage of opportunities provided in our education bills 
to keep schools open late so teens have someplace to go besides the 
streets or to launch community drug courts to give nonviolent offenders 
a chance to get off drugs before they end up in jail or to make 
community policing work, something that's making the rounds in 
Pennsylvania today.
    Our crime bill fulfilled a commitment I made to the American people 
to put 100,000 new police officers on the street in community policing. 
It's an old-fashioned idea, really. It means put the police back on the 
street, in the neighborhood, working with neighbors to spot criminals, 
shutting down crack houses, stopping crime before it happens, getting to 
know children on the street and encouraging them to stay away from 
crime. But community policing only works by definition when there is a 
community for the police to work with.

[[Page 840]]

    Now, whenever this happens crime comes down. Violent crimes have 
dropped in this country for 3 years in a row now because we're finally 
getting enough police out there on the street and because people are 
working with them. In Lancaster County, a 2-hour drive from here, our 
community police program put 12 new officers into the downtown area--
listen to this--they patrolled on foot, bicycle, and horseback, they 
worked with the community, the crime dropped by 67 percent. Pretty soon 
they'll be surprised when they hear a report of crime.
    This can be done. But I have to tell you, there's a big hurdle up 
the road, and it can't be solved without more citizen help. Because in 
spite of the fact that the crime rate has dropped for 3 years in a row, 
the violent crime rate by people under 18 is still going up. And any of 
you who are in education know that there is a huge group of young people 
under 18, now coming into grade school, coming up through our system of 
education, a higher percentage of them than any previous generation, 
born out of wedlock, born without the guidance of two parents, born into 
difficult family situations, out there having to raise themselves.
    So even if you have a Ph.D., you've got to care about these kids. 
They're your kids. They're coming home to your roost, and they will 
affect your country and your children's future and what kind of America 
we live in. And we cannot solve the problem of rising crime among young 
people, even with our antidrug strategy, even with our antigang 
strategy, even with 100,000 more police, unless there are citizens who 
are willing to step into the gap in those children's lives to teach them 
right from wrong, to give them a good future to look forward to, to give 
them the character and values to walk into that future, to make it 
possible for them to imagine that one day they might get a degree from a 
place like Penn State. You have to be willing to do that wherever you 
live.
    I will just give you one simple example. There are 20,000 
neighborhood crime watch groups in America--20,000. If 50 people join 
each one of these groups we would have a citizen force of a million new 
community activists to work with those 100,000 police officers, not just 
to catch criminals but to keep kids away from crime. Fifty people in 
every group, a million Americans reaching out to children, stopping 
crimes, catching criminals. If that happened--and no Government program 
can make it happen--if that happened in community after community after 
community in the United States, people would be surprised when they 
heard at night a news report of a serious crime. And America would be a 
better place. We'd be a lot closer to our shared vision of America in 
the 21st century.
    And that brings me to the last point I wish to make. We have a lot 
of challenges as a people to rebuild the strength of our communities and 
our national community. We're still too divided over racial matters. 
We're still too divided over religious disputes. We still have other 
problems that are simply unmet that can't be met by Government. Helping 
children on welfare to move off of welfare, helping communities to 
reduce the crime rate, these are not the only areas in which we 
desperately need more citizen involvement to make America the place it 
ought to be.
    Those of you who have college degrees, those of you who may earn a 
great deal of money will still find that in too many ways where you live 
the bonds of community have been weakened. There are too many places 
where people are working harder, moving more often, spending less time 
with each other and more time exhausted in front of the television. Even 
prosperous, happy neighborhoods often find that not everybody knows 
their neighbors.
    So I say to you, with this wonderful, precious commodity of a fine 
education, I hope you will go out into your community and find some way 
to give back some of what your country has given to you. No matter what 
you do or how busy you are, there is always a way to serve a larger 
community. The story of your generation should be the story of how we 
restore broken lives and shattered promises through citizen service.
    We're going to balance this budget over the next 6 years. We're 
going to have a big fight about how to do it, as you know. [Laughter.] 
But don't let that obscure the fact--this deficit is less than half of 
what it was 4 years ago. And it's coming down. Don't

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obscure the real fact. And that's very important because as we move to 
balance the budget, we can keep interest rates down, and we can keep 
investment up and create jobs for the American people and get incomes 
rising again, which has been the source of constant anxiety in places 
like Pennsylvania where people lost really good jobs and couldn't get 
other jobs paying at the same or better wages. It's an important thing 
to do.
    I will do my best to protect our investments in education, in the 
environment, in the quality and character of the Medicare and Medicaid 
programs. But make no mistake about it: As we shrink Government, until 
we balance the budget, there will be even more reliance on citizen 
servants to meet the needs of the American people because we can't 
shrink from our challenges on the grounds that we're shrinking the 
deficit.
    There's an emerging consensus in Washington, believe it or not, 
across party lines that we ought to do more to help charities and 
religious institutions and families and individuals to step in where 
Government can't anymore or where it shouldn't. I'll give you just a few 
examples. Leaders in both parties, from Senator Joe Lieberman, a 
Democrat of Connecticut, to Senator Dan Coats, a Republican from 
Indiana, have proposed reforms to encourage private citizens to assume 
responsibilities that are not and cannot be fulfilled by Government 
agencies alone. For example, making sure every child has a loving home 
is a national priority. But Government doesn't raise children, only good 
parents can do that. That's why earlier this week, I urged Congress to 
enact one of these bipartisan proposals, a $5,000 tax credit to help 
families, working families, adopt children. And just a few hours ago, 
that proposal passed with an almost unanimous vote in the House of 
Representatives. It is going to become the law of the land.
    We created AmeriCorps, the national service program, in 1993, so we 
could give our young people a chance to earn their way through college 
by giving something back to their community and their country. Since 
that time, AmeriCorps has given more than 40,000 young people all across 
this country a chance to serve, to work with troubled teenagers, 
immunize children, help seniors who don't have enough support, clean up 
the environment, do countless other things. I have met so many of these 
young people around the country who tell me that the experience 
literally changed their lives and they'll never spend another year of 
their life without taking some time to rebuild their community. That is 
the kind of spirit we need to create in all of America.
    I want to thank your former Senator, Harris Wofford, for agreeing to 
head the AmeriCorps program and for ensuring its continuation.
    I want to thank our constructive critics, like Senator Charles 
Grassley of Iowa, the Republican Senator from Iowa, who worked with 
Senator Wofford to strengthen the Americorps program and to preserve it.
    Let me just suggest three other things that we could do to get more 
young people involved. First, I've asked Congress to increase funding 
for work-study programs for students so that we can have a million 
students earning their way through college by the year 2000. Today I'd 
like to ask Penn State and every other institution of higher education 
in the country to consider using more of this money to promote service, 
to put thousands of college students to work in community service. If 
it's good for students to earn money by putting books back in library 
shelves or working in the dean's office, surely it makes sense for them 
to earn money helping teen mothers handle their responsibilities, 
helping older people get around, helping young people to look to a 
brighter future.
    Second, I challenge every high school in America to make service a 
part of its basic ethic. Every high school student who can do so should 
do some community service. There are some schools, both public and 
private, that require community service as a part of their curriculum. I 
say, good for them. Commitment to community should be an ethic we learn 
as soon as possible so we carry it throughout our lives.
    And third, I challenge every community to help those high school 
students answer the call of service. Today, I'm prepared to make an 
offer and challenge any school district or civic organization in the 
country to match it: If you will raise $500 to reward a high school 
student who has done significant work to

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help your community, the Federal Government will match your $500 and 
help that student go on to college. That would cost us, by the way, 
about $10 million if every high school in the country did it. It would 
be the best $10 million we ever spent. We would get hundreds of millions 
of dollars of improved quality of life and service to people as a result 
of it.
    This fall, I'll announce the winners of a nationwide competition to 
identify schools that have done the best job in encouraging this kind of 
service. Students at those schools will become national service 
scholars. A year from now I want it to be even bigger. I want every 
principal in America to be able to stand up before a graduating class 
and announce the name of a national service scholar. We should make 
service to the community a part of every high school in America and a 
part of the life of every dedicated citizen in the United States.
So, my fellow Americans, in spite of all we have to do to create more 
opportunity, we also must find a way to urge, cajole, plead, generate, 
demand more responsibility for ourselves, our families, our communities, 
and our country.
    This summer in Atlanta we will celebrate the centennial of the 
modern Olympics. It's a great honor to host those Olympics in the United 
States. But I ask you to think when you see these young people come out 
about more than medals and who will win and lose. The real meaning of 
the Olympics is what miracles happen to people when they make a deep and 
profound commitment to take personal responsibility for just becoming 
the best that they can be and when they're willing to work with 
teammates to make their common endeavors even greater. That is the great 
strength of America.
    You know, the president mentioned earlier that--or maybe it was the 
chairman of your board--about Pennsylvania's role in starting this 
country. And I want you to think about this as I close. Our Founding 
Fathers, who did so much of their work right here in Pennsylvania, would 
not be surprised that in this new era, with all of its possibilities, 
there are still a lot of tough problems. They were very smart. They knew 
there would never be a perfect, problem-free time. They wouldn't be 
surprised at all. But they would be very surprised and bitterly 
disappointed if we were to give into pessimism about these problems, 
deny their existence, and walk away from them. They knew--you can read 
it in ``The Federalists Papers,'' you can read it in the founding 
documents--they knew that freedom requires responsibility and service 
for personal prosperity and for the common good.
    You graduates have been blessed with the richest educational 
experience the world can offer. As Americans, you've been blessed to 
inherit the greatest country on Earth. Now you have to honor that debt 
by asking yourselves, what do I want my country to be like in the 21st 
century, and what am I prepared to do to make it a reality?
    I will do all I can to give you the opportunities to make the most 
of your lives, but you must do all you can to assume responsibility for 
yourselves, your families, and your communities. If you do that, I 
believe your life will be a lot happier and richer and you will surely 
make the 21st century America's greatest days.
    Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.

Note: The President spoke at 3:11 p.m. at the Bryce Jordon Center. In 
his remarks, he referred to Graham Spanier, president; Leslie Arnelle, 
chairman, Board of Trustees; John A. Brighton, executive vice president 
and provost; Rodney Erickson, professor, Pennsylvania State University; 
and Thomas Hollander, president, Pennsylvania State University Alumni 
Association. This item was not received in time for publication in the 
appropriate issue.