Transcript
0:07 [Applause] Mr. President, I am pleased to introduce Rogan Kersh now, professor of public service, Robert F. Wagner, Graduate School of Public Service. He's also the associate dean for academic affairs at the Wagner School. He will present the candidate for doctor of laws. Will Kaldun Khalifa Amubarak please escort this candidate to the lecture.
1:11 Heat up here. William Jefferson Clinton, deeply revered and celebrated citizen of your nation and the world. You are one of the most natural and supremely gifted political leaders of your generation who left an indelible mark on America's domestic and foreign policy. From modest but deeply felt roots, you attended Georgetown University and Yale Law School, held a road scholarship, and were elected governor of Arkansas, all by age 32.
2:04 [Applause] elected as the 42nd president of the United States in 1992. You oversaw in your two terms the longest economic expansion in United States history.
2:35 the highest historical rates of college [Applause] enrollment and the cleanest environment in a [Applause] generation. You brought to an end the murderous ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. [Applause] Now embraced with the honorific president of the world, you exert your staggering intelligence and compelling energy and empathy to benefit broad sectors of global society. As founder of the William J. Clinton Foundation and as UN special envoy to the earthquake ravaged nation of Haiti, [Applause] You infuse in us the joy of serving by a magnificent personal example. So that in our lifetime, as the poet wrote, the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.
3:57 William Jefferson Clinton, a vital figure, a vital figure in the cause of humanity, a nation's treasure, a deeply cherished global humanitarian. You are a warm friend of NYU and a frequent presence here, graciously lending distinction and support to our old global endeavors. as one privilege to call you a friend now for three decades. It gives me great personal privilege on behalf of my university to say by the authority vested in me by New York University, I am pleased to confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Laws Anoris Cowzer.
5:35 Thank you very much. Thank you so much, President Saxon, board chair Lipton, Provos Mccclaclin, ladies and gentlemen. First, let me congratulate the graduates, their families and friends. [Applause] Thank the faculty, administration and staff of NYU for making this journey possible for them and say how profoundly honored I am to be here with my fellow honorary degree participants Clive Davis, Claire Fagan, and Otto Jonath. They have lived remarkable lives and today you embark on another phase of your remarkable lives. This is a happy time for the graduates, their families.
6:44 And I think 41 years from now, I can say that because I I can't believe it, but I was where you are 41 years ago. I remember almost everything my commencement speaker said for one reason. 90 seconds after he began, a huge storm gathered over the courtyard at Georgetown University. And he said, "If you want a copy of my speech, write me. I'll send it to you. Let's get out of here or we'll all drown."
7:23 Unhappily for you, God has blessed us with a clear sky. I talked to Hillary last night. She said, you know, when I spoke there, it rained. Don't be [Applause] upset. You have a clear sky. But I will nonetheless strive to be both relevant and brief.
7:59 First, I am personally indebted to NYU for a number of things. The Stern School works works with our economic opportunity initiative which now operates in inner cities all over America trying to make sure that small businesses can not only survive but thrive in a difficult environment. And second, your students, faculty, and staff have been strong participants in our global initiative and the global initiative for university students to empower girls and women to stop the trafficking in women and children to advance the cause of health education and a sustainable future around the world.
8:52 I looked at the profile of the students before I came and I saw that about 10% of you are international students. That's a gross understatement. That's a gross understatement because a lot of you who are Americans are also international students and I know that you live in the most interdependent age in history. The borders of the world look more like nets than walls. 10 year olds can find out things on the internet. I had to go to university to learn. Interdependence simply means that we're aware of things going on half a world away we wouldn't have known about a generation ago and that what people do a half a world away can infect and affect us and we can affect them.
9:53 The great challenge of your life will be how to live out your personal story. Pursue your personal dreams. Enjoy your personal compassions and compulsions and interests in a world that is getting better not worse. Where the forces of positive interdependence outweigh the negative ones. In that pursuit, I have only two pieces of personal advice. One is you should strive to find happiness every day and not believe it comes at the end of a journey. And most people are happiest doing what they're good at. You have been given the power through your education to pursue what you're good at.
10:51 The second piece of advice I was reminded of all over again when I read about your student speaker Michelle [Applause] Pomemeroy according to the program anyway on the day before she was to leave for NYU in the beginning of her freshman year she was riding a horse in Kansas was thrown off the horse into a barn wall and cracked two ribs. She came on time anyway, just like she was supposed to. There is something to be said for not quitting, not giving up, and showing up through the difficult times as well as the easy ones. If you pursue your dreams, you can't quit when you fail. You can't quit when you mess up. And you can't quit when life seems to deal you a tough hand. You have been given the tools to triumph. Now it is up to your will, your mind, and your heart.
11:47 [Applause] Now, here's what I want to say about the interdependent world. You have to decide what you'd like the world to look like when your children are sitting where you're sitting today. I know what I want it to look like. I want it to be a world of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities. A world with a sense of deep community across all our differences and a profound obligation to the future. A world where we use the earth that we've been given, but where we do whatever it takes to preserve it for our grandchildren.
12:38 a world where we celebrate our differences, but we believe our common humanity matters more. Now, if that's the world you want, you have to ask yourself, how do you get it? You must build up the positive and reduce the negative forces raging across our interdependent world and piercing all our net-like borders. What are the most important negative forces of interdependence? The world we live in is too unequal. As you celebrate today your graduation from one of the great universities in this or any nation, there are two things you need to remember. First, college graduates this year will have more personal debt than any class before you.
13:42 And second in the last decade, the United States, which still ranks first in the world in the percentage of our young people going on to university, dropped from first to 12th in the percentage of our young people actually achieving four-year college degrees in no small measure because of a shrinking economy and rising cost. We have to do something about that. But that is a manifestation of growing inequality across the world within and among countries. Second, the world you live in is unstable. Not just because violence can cross borders and non-state actors can cause trouble, but because disease can cross borders. Because the financial crisis, which sadly began here, spread almost instantaneously. first to the United Kingdom, then Ireland, then Iceland, then to the exporting countries because people couldn't afford to buy their product. We had to find a way to reduce the negative instability of modern life without going to a totally static world where nothing would grow.
14:56 And finally, the world we live in is unsustainable because of the way we produce and consume energy. Just a few days ago, there was a remarkable meeting of a group I helped to organize in 1996 called the Arctic Council. They met in the tiny capital of Greenland, Nook, and they discussed how they would share the responsibilities. The Arctic Council, which are basically the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Canada, the United States, how they would share the responsibilities for what is happening. Some people look forward to the global warming, which will make it easier to explore for oil and gas. But what else does it mean that the plants bloom 15 days early in the Arctic Circle this year? That soon you can take a boat across the North Pole in the summertime and visit Santa Claus. It means that the ice pack on Greenland is melting. It's 8% of the world's fresh water. If it all melts and falls into the North Atlantic, it could block the Gulf Stream. And perversely, as the planet warms, it could make northern Europe, northern Canada, and the northernmost portions of the United States, as cold as they were 700 years ago in the many ice age, wreaking havoc with some of the most productive and I might say egalitarian societies on Earth.
16:27 We have to find a way to put more people to work by reducing our carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions instead of increasing them. Now final question so how do you do that? The only thing I want to say about that today is there is a fundamental difference between the challenge facing the poorest places and the p challenges facing the wealthiest. In Haiti, where I spend much of my life now, we just inaugurated a new president. in Africa and Southeast Asia and Latin America where we sell the world's least expensive AIDS and malaria medicines and help to build up health systems. What they need are systems, things you take for granted. We would be shocked if the microphone failed or the lights went out today, but I spent a lot of my life in places where people take none of that for granted. They need systems. And a lot of you have worked in places where you see young people just as intelligent as you are, just as hardworking as you are. They simply don't have life chances because they don't have the systems that guarantee good consequences for hard work and good behavior. That is a big challenge.
18:00 The United States is emblematic of the challenges facing the wealthy places on earth and they too are worthy of your efforts. We all have systems otherwise we wouldn't be here. John told you we've been friends with President Saxon for nearly 30 years and we are the poster children of the triumph of American systems that gave guys like us a chance to make a little something of our lives and gave great opportunities to my wife and the first generation of women who were able to break through a lot of glass ceilings that existed Before the problem with all countries that have great systems is they get long in the tooth that they become so successful that those who run them are more interested in holding on to their positions and advancing the purposes for which they were established. More interested in maintaining the gains of the present than achieving even greater ones for our children in the future.
19:09 For example, I believe America has been hurt badly in the last 30 years by adopting two bad ideas that serve the interest of people who are sitting at top the various totem polls in America today. I was probably the last generation of Americans until the present day who could have gotten an MBA if I'd gone to business school instead of law school. With the prevailing theory being that American corporations had obligations primarily to all their stakeholders. Ever since then, we've been teaching our young people that your primary obligation is only to the shareholders.
19:54 The problem is if you do that, you ignore the other stakeholders. That could be why wages have been virtually stagnant for 30 years because the workers are stakeholders. It could be why communities haven't been able to undertake economic transformations in many places because communities are stakeholders. It could be why customers don't care so much what the source of their purchases are. They're stakeholders. I think we have to move back toward a stakeholder, not just a shareholder only society in the United States and throughout the world. The second wrong idea is that the only problem America has is that the government, especially the national government, messes everything up that it touches. It would mess up a twocar parade.
20:50 There is no such thing as a good tax, no such thing as a bad tax cut, no such thing as a good regulation, no such thing as a bad deregulation. That contradicts the evidence in the United States and every other country in the world. The only truly successful countries have both strong economies and effective governments and a public private partnership to share the future. That is the ultimate answer to this debate going on [Applause] today. For example, 2012 will mark the year that the Kyoto Accord on climate change expires. In 1997, when the Kyoto Accord was completed, there were 44 wealthy countries that promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a specific amount.
21:45 Only four will certainly make it. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Before the financial meltdown, all four had lower unemployment rates in America. And all four had reached their goal in radically different ways. But they did have one thing in common. There was a public private partnership, a commitment to grow the economy, start businesses, reduce inequality, and prove it was good economics to save the planet for our grandchildren. It is a cautionary tale for the [Applause] future.
22:25 So do what you love and work hard at it and don't quit. Create a world of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, and a shared sense of community. Believe in this small planet that the only way to win the future is to share it. The only way to share it is to do it in a way that preserves it for our children and grandchildren and believe that our differences really matter. Think of the remarkably different careers the people who have received honorary degrees have had today.
23:10 But we all got here because at some level at critical junctures what prevailed was an understanding that our common humanity matters more. The human genome project has revealed that we are somewhere between 99.5 and 99.9% the same. that every non-age related difference you can see in this audience, including gender and race, is rooted in somewhere between a tenth and a half a percent of our genetic differences. And yet almost all of us spend 99.5% of our time thinking about the half a percent of us that is different, even obsessing about it and wishing it were more so.
24:05 So that is what I leave you with. I wish you well. I think it can be the most interesting time in human history, an age of prosperity and peace and discovery, but only if it is an age of genuine community and sharing. Good luck and God bless you.