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REMARKS BY THE FIRST LADY
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
PENNSYLVANIA COMMENCEMENT
May 17, 1993
Thank you. Thank you very much. It is indeed an honor for me
to be part of this celebratory commencement at one of the premier and
oldest institutions of education in our country. I want to thank President
Hackney, the regents, the other honorary degree recipients, faculty,
alumni, family members, citizens but most of all those of you who graduate
this year from the end of your various degree programs whom I had the
privilege to watch march by me just 15 minutes ago. I wish everyone in this
stadium and indeed everyone in this great city could have stood there
with us and watched not only the faces of individuals, many of you look
like you've been celebrating already, but the diversity, the excitement,
the hopefulness, the enthusiasm and the sense of moving forward into a
future that none of us can predict but for which each of you has been well
prepared.
Commencements are a time to stop and think about the past, to
celebrate this present moment and to look forward into the future. There is
no way that any commencement speaker at any campus this spring could stand
before you and tell you what will happen. Not tomorrow, not next year, not
for the rest of any of your lives. But part of the reason commencement
speeches have a certain similarity and familiarity to them is because when
one does stand in front of a group like this, impressed by your
accomplishments and achievements, remembering one's own past, it is an
opportunity to talk about some of the ideals and values that have withstood
the test of time and which can be guiding principals in lives well lead.
I started my morning on campus here sitting on the park bench
with Benjamin Franklin and I hope each of you has had that same
opportunity. The way that he sits there, in this relaxed manor, the way he
looks at you as you look back at him as though he were making yet again an
important point that needed to be repeated, gives one a sense of the
continuity of time and life and history in this institution which is very
reassuring. And then when I opened the program for this commencement and
saw the quotation from Benjamin Franklin that I had intended to use as
well, I was struck by how at this moment what he began all those years ago
before we were even a country had special meaning.
Franklin was, as the program says, an advocate of good
citizenship. "We may make these times better if we bestir ourselves," he
wrote. The nobelist question in the world is "What good may I do in it?"
That is the question for this commencement. That will be, I hope, the
question you ask yourselves as you journey through your life. That journey
will not always be an easy one, it will not always have clear
directions attached to it. As we are here in this magnificent stadium we
can remember the many Penn Relays that have been held here and think often
about the different kinds of events that take place. And although I am
always impressed by everyone of them, sprints and hurdles and other track
and field events, for me life is not a sprint, it is a marathon. It is
something you prepare for and often you keep going through when times
are tough, when you may even know where you are heading. And one of the
questions to ask yourself is Franklin's. Because often by asking "what good
may I do in it?" you end up giving yourself that direction and not only
doing good but feeling good about that.
There are many people in this stadium today who are
responsible for your being here. Who believed in their journey, who
believed that as parents and family members they had responsibilities to
you and worked every day, often through hard times, to try to fulfil them.
Because a college degree is a collective achievement because for every
person dressed in black here in front of me I know there are people in the
stands who are proud and often thinking back to when their checking
accounts looked more red than black as they sacrificed to make this day
happen.
And speaking of sacrifice, I just need to get this out of
way. A reporter asked me about my new haircut, I know its been on all of
your minds it is after all, the number one issue. I had a friend call me
from Japan who saw it on CNN. So I told him the truth, that when the
President called for sacrifice and asked everybody at the White House to
get a 25% cut I decided to go for a 50% cut to do my part.
When I graduated from college in 1969, I too had dreams for
my life and I also hoped to be able as I fulfilled those dreams to think
about what good I might do if I bestirred myself. I gave a speech at my
commencement and I have had an occasion in the last year to go back and
re-read that. I see the idealism, I see the excitement and I see some of
the naivete that marked me and marked many who are at the beginning of
their adulthood. I know that at twenty-one, I did not fully appreciate the
political and social restraints that one faces in the world. I know that
I assumed that we could overcome a lot of these obstacles that are
still with us, despite the progress we have made. But I am glad that I felt
idealistic at twenty-one because I think it is
important to feel that way and I have tried to maintain that
feeling as I have grown older.
My father, if he were here today, would tell you that the
reason I have changed from being a Goldwater Girl to a Democrat is because
I went to college. Not that he didn't approve of my going to college, he
always believed in education but that I came out different than what he had
sent. Some of you may have had those conversations with your parents. What
is it you learned and why do you feel that way now? But always during my
growing up years and through college and beyond, what I loved and
respected about my father is that he always took what I believed and cared
about seriously, even when he disagreed very strongly. And there was always
in our home an opportunity for the kind of discourse, one might say
arguments, that mark people who care deeply and who have ideals. Being
twenty-one is a license to be idealistic and I encourage all of us, no
matter what age, to keep renewing that license because our world needs us
to do that.
The sixties were a time of momentous change in our country
but so are the nineties. Our world has changed dramatically from the days
of assassinations, of wars, of riots. But yet, as we look around us today
and we see all of the positive changes that we have lived with, we know
that there is still much to be done in this, the most powerful nation on
earth. Too many people work too hard without ever getting ahead. The
Philadelphia Inquirer, in its Pulitzer Prize winning series of a year or so
ago, in talking about what has happened to the American Dream, made
that point forcefully. Many of the people in this stadium who have
worked hard for a living have seen the security they thought they were
working for, be endangered because the world around us is presenting new
economic challenges that we have to be prepared to face. To few of our
people today can meet those challenges and take advantage of our new
opportunities.
They have not been prepared, they have not been prepared to
negotiate this new world because in too many cases families are not
offering the kind of stability and structure that builds skills and
confidence in children. And other institutions including our schools are
not setting high expectations and working hard to assure that children
achieve those expectations. We have to learn how to make change our friend
because no one can repeal the laws of change or tell you it will turn
around and be the way that it once was. So today more than ever, we need
to focus our attention on our children, give them the stability and
structures they need and once again make education the passport to the
American dream that it used to be. Because as we look around us, we see
that there is a lot of work to be done.
We can look at places that are now on our front pages that we
never heard of a few years ago, with names like Bosnia or Somalia. We can
watch the spread of ethnic hatred, nuclear
proliferation, starvation, and the kinds of problems that come
into our living rooms whether we want them or not. And here at home we
watch our cities crumbling under the dual assault of drugs and guns that
create a level of violence that is unacceptable. Within a few miles from
this campus on this beautiful day we know that there are children whose
parents are afraid to let them play outside. Who cannot faithfully walk
to school. We know there are young people who are beset by hopelessness
and despair. How can we claim to be civilized when our children can not
even leave their homes in safety? How much longer will we permit those
kinds of conditions, in which drugs and guns determine the quality of life
to continue?
Now is a good time for us at this commencement to take a deep
breath and decide how each of us will deal with these challenges. Because
if you do not shape your life, circumstances will. Like generations of
Americans, you will look for the right balance in your lives. A balance of
work, and family and service. A balance between your rights as individuals
and your responsibilities to yourselves, your families, your
communities, your country and our world. I hope your experience here at
this university will serve as a guide. Here you have met people from
diverse backgrounds. You've had your ideas and beliefs tested you've had to
learn what you're willing to stand for and stand against. You have been
part of a microcosm of the restless and diverse country we call America.
You have seen people from every kind of background, every religion, every
continent on this earth. You know well that you have had an opportunity to
argue about what you think should happen and you've even had the chance
to argue seemingly contradictory positions. Because if your college years
were anything like mine, you have probably been in a position to take
different positions even more than once in an evening's discussion, to try
out these new ideas and to try out what your real values and beliefs are.
What we have to do here at this university and in this
country, is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our
differences without fracturing our communities. We must always uphold the
idea of our colleges as incubators of ideas and havens for free speech and
free thought. And our country and our colleges must also be communities.
Communities of learning, not just book learning but people learning. Where
every person's human dignity is respected. Freedom and respect are not
values that should be in conflict with each other. They are basic
American values that reinforce each other. But, we cannot debate our
differences nor face our mutual challenges unless and until we respect each
other, men and women, young and old, across the ethnic and racial lines
that divide us. I know that you share, you share the general distress that
any acts of hate, hateful acts, hateful words, hateful incidents that occur
too frequently today in our communities and even on our college campuses.
In a
nation founded on the promise of human dignity, our colleges,
our communities, our country should challenge hatred where ever we find
it. But we should listen as well as lecture, confront problems not people
and find ways to work together to promote the common good. We must be
careful not to cross the line between censoring behavior that we consider
unacceptable and censuring, that's u and o. For the all the injustices in
our past and our present we have to believe that in the free exchange of
ideas justice will prevail over injustice, tolerance over intolerance
and progress over reaction.
And we have seen that in our own history, in the struggles
over civil rights, worker's rights, women's rights, human rights. We have
seen how movements armed only with the power of their ideas have prevailed
over ingrained prejudices and entrenched injustices. That is why is it
always time for a free and open discussion in every college and every
community throughout our country about how we can live together, bring out
the best in each other, make our diversity a source of strength and not
weakness. We are all in this together and we have to recognize that because
as the President had said, we don't have a person to waste in this
interdependent world in which we live.
Now how do we strike the right balance between individual
rights and responsibility? How do we create a new spirit of community given
all of the problems we are so aware of? Regrettably the balance between
the individual and the community, between rights and responsibilities has
been thrown out of kilter over the last years. Throughout the 1980's we did
hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed.
We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to
define the common good and to repair the social contracts. And we also
found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to
the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.
One eloquent description of the inter-connection between
individual identity and the individual's responsibility to society comes
from Vaclav Havel, the playwright who is now the President of the Czech
Republic. He went to prison during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia
because he could neither be free as an individual nor responsible as a
member of a community. Because the community in which he found himself
suppressed thought, speech, religion and the other rights we cherish,
and undermined individual responsibility and respect among citizens.
Havel wrote to his wife Olga from prison, "Everything meaningful in life is
distinguished by a certain transcendence of individual human existence
beyond the limits of mere self-care toward other people, toward society,
toward the world. Only by looking outward, by caring for things that in
terms of pure survival, you needn't bother with at all, and by throwing
yourself over and over again into the tumult of the world with the
intention of
making your voice count only thus will you really become a
person."
Each of you will be defining the meaning of your own life by
your actions from this day forward just as you have, consciously or
unconsciously, to this point. How you make those decisions and those
turning points as to what you believe in and who you are, will at the end,
sum up the life you have lead. There are many opportunities and some of you
have already seized them. This campus has an extraordinary number of
people who have committed themselves to public service while they are here.
This country is about to be committed to national service because it is
time for us to once again create opportunities for all people, but
particularly young people, to be of service. Just as in my generation, with
the help of people like Senator Wofford, President Kennedy challenged young
people to be of service to the country and the world, today we have a new
call to responsibility. A domestic peace corp that will help young
people pay for college or job training by performing community service,
helping children learn to read and write, working in hospitals, helping the
homeless, cleaning up the environment, helping yourselves, finding meaning
by helping others.
There is also a great opportunity that some of you are
already seizing. Because of part of my husband's, "Summer of Service,"
proposal, a grant has already been awarded to a program here in
Philadelphia, "Immunize Children At Early Risk, I Care". It will put 150
college age students from throughout Philadelphia to work this summer. They
will immunize more than 5,000 children, they will earn money for college,
they will make a contribution to the community and I would argue they will
have an opportunity to find some meaning in their lives that teaches
them about who they are. When they come home from this immunization
effort and look into their mirrors they will see people who have been
changed by that experience.
We also have a great opportunity as a country to face a
problem that is not only one of finance and delivery systems and buzz words
like that but which challenges really, again, who we are as a people. And
that is the challenge of health care. The first medical school in our
country started at the University of Pennsylvania. The issue of health care
bounded onto the national agenda because of the election of Harris Wofford.
And it is time now as a nation to recognize that we have a chance to
provide health care to all of our people and to do so in a more
economical and humane way than we have up until now. I have traveled all
over this country and I can tell you, based on personal experience that
antidote after antidote, that although we are the richest country in the
world and we have the best of medical care available in the world we spend
more money on health care and take care of fewer people than our
competitors who provide health care to all of the people and have better
outcomes for the money that they spend on it. What we have instead is a
patch work non-system. People who are employed but without insurance,
people who have pre-existing conditions and can not get insurance, people
who thought that they were part of an employment contract and would always
have their health care being taken care of who are now watching that be
stripped away through lay-offs and other kinds of changes. Most people in
this country who are uninsured get up every day and go to work. They would
be a lot better off when it comes to health care if they went on
welfare. What kind of signal does it send to the 37 million uninsured
Americans, 82% who work or who are in the families of workers, to be able
to say that? What kind of responsibility does that imply?
Health care is an important issue also for the economy. As
all of these Wharton graduates will soon discover first hand, if they have
not already in their work experience, we have given away competitive
advantage after competitive advantage because our major companies pay more
in health care benefits every single year in a system that is out of
control. The expense of that health care makes too many products more
expensive than the competition. We in effect say to our manufacturers," tie
both arms behind you then get out in the world and compete and make
jobs for Americans." Unless we do something now, by the year 2000 almost
one out of every five dollars that you will earn will be spent on health
care. And that will be spent without insuring one more American, providing
better health care in any rural communities or any inner city. We need to
make some solemn commitments and change in the direction of insuring that
every American will be secure. If you change jobs or if lose your job
you will still be insured. If you get sick or if you have a pre- existing
condition you will still be insured. If you are an older American and need
help with prescription drugs and a start on long term care, particularly in
your home, you will be insured. If you are a physician, or a nurse, or a
pharmacist or a dentist, you will no longer spend 20-40% of your time
and income filling out countless, meaningless forms. If you are an
employer who has been struggling to maintain health insurance benefits for
your employees you will see that cost stabilize and decrease over time.
This health care issues is not just an issue of economics,
although it is that. It is a human issue, it is a social issue and it goes
to the very root of who we are as a people. Can we take care of ourselves
and be more responsible about our health, can we take better care of our
families, can we have a healthier country? I'm betting that the answer to
all those is, yes. Because I'm betting that in these very exciting and
challenging times, as we move toward a sense of community and define
the common good in terms that include us all but set standards by which
to judge our progress together, that there will be contributions from all
of us that will meet the challenges we face.
And for each of you, I think you are living in very exciting
times and I hope that as you go forth from this university you do so with
the kind of high spirits and enthusiasm I saw today. And that you
understand that this marathon we all run for, which none of us knows where
the end will be, cannot only be an exhilarating experience, but it can be
one that leads to meaning in a challenging time for us as individuals and
for us as a people. Thank you all. And Godspeed.
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