The following is an excerpt from President Bill Clinton’s address at
the University of California at San Diego commencement June 14. This is
the second time in a month that President Clinton has appeared in The
Last Word. The last time was in the May 29 edition, an excerpt from his
speech at Morgan State University.
Of all the questions of discrimination and prejudice that still
exist in our society, the most perplexing one is the oldest, and in
some ways today, the newest: the problem of race.
Now, when there is more cause for hope than fear, when we are not
driven to it by some emergency or social cataclysm, now is the time we
should learn together, talk together and act together to build one
America.
What is it that we must do?
First, we must continue to expand opportunity. Full participation in
our strong and growing economy is the best antidote to envy, despair,
and racism. We must press forward to move millions more from poverty
and welfare to work; to bring the spark of enterprise to inner cities;
to redouble our efforts to reach those rural communities prosperity has
passed by. And most important of all, we simply must give our young
people the finest education in the world.
There are no children who, because of their ethnic or racial
background, cannot meet the highest academic standards if we set them
and measure our students against them, if we give them well-trained
teachers and well-equipped classrooms, and if we continue to support
reasoned reforms to achieve excellence, like the charter school
movement.
At a time when college education means stability, a good job, a
passport to the middle class, we must open the doors of college to all
Americans and we must make a least two years of college as universal at
the dawn of the next century as a high school diploma is today.
