Human letters. [applause] William Jefferson clinton, 42nd president of the united states, born in the aptly named city of hope, arkansas, to a recently widowed mother and raised by a caring grandfather with a high school education. Inspired to Public Service as a teenager by president john f. Kennedy, and taught by his own College Professor that america was the greatest nation in history because our people believed in two things that tomorrow could be better than today, and that everyone has a personal responsibility to work to that end. For your Public Service as arkansass attorney general, president and the 42nd of united states, for your continued philanthropic work across the globe with the clinton foundation, hobart and William Smith colleges honors your Public Service and achievements. And we thank you for your optimistic vision and for always reminding america to never stop thinking about tomorrow. [laughter] therefore, it is my distinct pleasure, by the authority of the board of trustees, to bestow on William Jefferson clinton this degree, doctor of humane letters, together with all the privileges and obligations thereto pertaining. Congratulations, mr. President. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, to deliver our commencement address, the 42nd president , William Jefferson clinton. [applause] pres. Clinton president gearan, mary, your wonderful daughters, i thank you for bringing me here the first time in 2001. Back then, you had only been president a couple of years, and you were kind of on your average job tenure. When i was president , mark was director of communications, deputy chief of staff in the white house, and then the head of the peace corps, and he did it all in six years. He couldnt hold down a job to save his life. [laughter] pres. Clinton and here he is, the longestserving president in the history of these Great Institutions. I am very proud of him and very grateful to him and to mary for their friendship to hillary and to me, and to all of you. I love seeing them together, and i do think when she got that degree, it was the only act of nepotism i have ever observed in their long relationship. [laughter] pres. Clinton which goes to show you, that even though nepotism is getting a bad name today in some quarters, every now and then a little of it is called for. [laughter] [applause] pres. Clinton i want to thank the trustees, the faculty, the staff, and the administration, classes ofulate the 2017 and your parents and friends. To everyone to whom it applies, i wish you a happy mothers day. I think it is a great thing to have a commencement on mothers day. I will never forget the relief on my own mothers face when i finally got my degree at georgetown 49 years ago. Now, the fact that i actually got a degree 49 years ago almost certifies me for becoming a mummy at the museum of natural history. I know that. [laughter] pres. Clinton but i will bet you this, i bet i am the only person here who has been out of college at least 10 years who remembers their Commencement Speakers address verbatim. [laughter] pres. Clinton and i learned the best speeches are short and relevant. [laughter] pres. Clinton we were at georgetown on the front lawn. The speaker, the mayor of washington, d. C. , Walter Washington, was introduced with great fanfare. A foreboding dark cloud came over the lawn immediately. Lighting was seen, thunder was heard. You could see it raining right behind the campus as the cloud was moving. And here was Walter Washingtons speech congratulations. If we dont get out of here right now, were all going to drown. [laughter] if youd like a copy of my speech, contact my office and ill send it to you. Good luck. [laughter] pres. Clinton that was it. If we had had a race for president it was 1968 if the election had occurred in that moment, Walter Washington would have received the writein votes of every member of our graduating class. [laughter] i want toton so speak a little longer, but not that much. I recommend you take some time today to ask yourselves, what did i really get out of this anyway . What did i learn . Whats more important, that i learned a lot of things i did not know . That i learned how to relate to people who were different from me that i never would have met had i not come here . Or that i learned how to think about things, in a world where economic, social, and Political Developments often seem like the sociological equivalent of chaos theory in physics. How good am i after all at connecting the dots . Oh yeah, i got a university degree, so i dont believe in all that alternative facts business. I still think it is important to be as accurate as possible and it really matters if you know anything, but can i connect the dots . Can i see the big picture . Can i see the patterns . And even if i cant, whats behind it . Am i a better version of what i was four years ago, or have i actually changed in some fundamental way . And what difference will it make to anyone besides me . I recommend you take just a little time to think about those things today, because you have all of these professors who worked hard, each in their own way, to get you to think about at least a piece of that. You have got your families that helped with their investment to the you a chance to have space and support to grab a little piece of understanding of one of the most exciting and, i believe, interdependent and rapidly changing periods in Human History. Worthk, for whatever its ill tell you what i think. I believe that this global interdependence in the end will turn out to be a good thing. But theres a lot of good and bad to it. You get on the internet and do all kinds of searches and find things that are sometimes even true. [laughter] but we also know that, like every other technological development, it is capable of bringing great good and great trouble. A lot of you, im sure, have followed closely, as i have, this whole global ransom over hacking files business. Turns out, it was perpetrated by a young person in the u. K. Who was thwarted by another young person, even younger, so that the damage done did not apparently reach any significant proportions in our own country. We know that this time of upheaval has thrown us together in different ways that benefit some people much more than others economically. We know that rapidly changing social and Living Patterns have been embraced by a lot of people but have mortified others, and at the very least have left them dislocated. At the beginning of all this, there was in theory a more settled time, when a higher percentage of people knew exactly who they were and exactly where they belonged. And a somehow, that was better. That just depends on where your forbearers were in that mythical time. When i was a boy, i fell in love with the great humorist will rogers, even though he was long dead by the time i was born. One of his greatest sayings, i thought, was dont tell me about the good old days, they never was. You have to ask yourself that. What do i think about this . Who am i . How do i fit in this world . Do you believe that it is the most interdependent age in Human History . If so, is the primary object to have you and your crowd dominate it, or do you want to create a world in which every Single Person has his or her shot at the fast lane . Do you believe constant combat works better to produce prosperity, harmony, peace . Or are Diverse Networks of people working together more likely to produce those good ends . Theres lots of evidence on this, you know. If we could take the person in this graduating class with the highest iq, if you could be identified, and we could miraculously spirit you off to one of these rooms, and say , you are going to be here for two days, tell us what you want and well get it for you. And the rest of us were compelled to spend the next two days under the elements hoping we didnt get rained on, drinking increasingly cold coffee and eating increasingly stale rolls. And the genius and we were fed 10 questions over two days. Over two days, youd make better decisions. And your diversity would guarantee you better decisions than a Homogenous Group of geniuses. We should relish our differences. And we should feel selfconfident in doing so, because from a strictly biological point of view, ally, we are about 99. 5 the same. All of us on planet earth. There is every difference evidenced in this crowd today gender, race, bodytype, hair color, eye color. Every single solitary thing we can see that is different is. 5 of our genome. Otherwise, we are kind of carbon copies. Now that. 5 since there is 3. 6 billion of them in your body is quite a substantial number, and it makes life much more interesting and much more important. But the point i am trying to make here is you cant nourish that diversity without first a bedrock acceptance in our common humanity. And yet we know in times of upheaval, when people arent settled and their identities are not clear, that sounds like just pap. And toughtalking realism is all about how this group is a threat, that group is a threat, another group is a threat. Ill give you an example. 0. 9 of americas population are muslims. 210,000 people have been killed in gun violence since 9 11. The percentage of them killed by muslims is less than. 3 . In other words, their murder rate is one third the national average. But weve all heard about it. Does that mean we shouldnt be tough on terrorism committed by islamic radicals . Of course not. But it means we shouldnt go around in a blind stupor, mixing apples and oranges and terrifying some of the most talented, devoted people in this country, who want to make their contribution and who help make us better, because diverse groups make better decisions and make a more interesting life. [applause] pres. Clinton ill give you another example. Are there are too many undocumented people in america . Yeah. Why . Because weve let over 30 years pass without adopting an immigration update. You cant change as much as we do without constantly revising your laws. If you want to protect your border and have standards for citizenship and the underlying facts are changing all the time, you have to be prepared to update these laws, in the best case probably every five years, but certainly every 10. And we know the reason we havent passed immigration reform. Because theres been a lot of bipartisan support for it. Economically, its easy to make the bipartisan case. But politically, it is not, because immigrants tend to be more communitarian in their , more familiar, more belief that the government should do its part to create better life chances for everybody. So we now have these crazy results, where a guy does two combat tours in afghanistan, risks his life for the rest of us. Whether you approve of what were doing over there or not, he did things that most americans dont do. And he got taken off the street and sent home the other day. Two combat tours. It kind of embarrasses me that we let a person risk his life for us and then kicked him out. A little town in West Virginia was convinced that all the immigrants were bad. A man who ran the local Mexican Restaurant was sent home. The town was in an uproar. I thought we were only sending bad people back . He had just been there 15 years, paying taxes, employing people, feeding people. Was it the right decision . Whether you think it was right or wrong, the point is this you have to decide whether a, you think our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences, and a precondition for making most of them. And b, whether we have an invested interest in diversity. Now if youre a native born american, you also have to face the fact that like every other prosperous country in the world, our birth rate among the native born goes down every year. And we are barely at replacement population levels. So without immigrants, our future growth rate will be much lower, and the tax burden that will be on those of us left will be much higher, because those of us who are older are the fastestgrowing part of americas population, and we consume more health care costs, for example. Im not asking to resolve this today. Im not even trying to make a political point exactly. The point i am trying to make is you have a Precious Resource in this country. It has given us, among other things, the best system of Higher Education, especially for undergrad, in the world and in the history of the world. This is a special place. Im looking out at my proud friends James Carville and mary matalin. I dont want to embarrass their daughter, matty, who is in this class, but i actually recommended she come here. [laughter] pres. Clinton and i said, this place is great. They Love Community service. It is serviceoriented. We have all got to expand our definition of citizenship to include that. Im not arguing for any specific position. I am just trying to say, you dont need a world that will put the american experiment and all americans in peril by saying us and them is a better model than expanding the definition of us and shrinking the definition of them. [applause] pres. Clinton you know, i do a lot of work now with the second president bush. We have fought like cats and dogs in our life. We have disagreed over all kinds of things. But he is not afraid of immigrants. He would happily go with me to south texas and have a political debate on any issue. And he knows we need them. If you look at his beautiful portraits of wounded veterans, its obvious that some of them are firstgeneration americans. This doesnt have to be a party issue. You have to decide, and your generation will determine, whether we view diversity as a strength or a problem. Whether we think our common humanity is more important, or our differences matter more. Everything else is going to be background music. I promise you, much as i hate it, russias cyber warfare doesnt bother me. Not if america keeps being america. They beat us into space, too, and look where we are today with our space programs. There is always lifes always going to have problems. We have a serious challenge today, to create more jobs in places where jobs have been left behind. But if we quit playing politics with it and think of the best way to do it, it would be fairly places where jobs have been left simple and straightforward to do. Im not worried about that. Im worried about whats in your mind and whats in your heart. As long as we believe our common humanity is more important, as long as we understand that diverse groups make better decisions than homogenous ones or lone geniuses, as long as we realize the great thing about life is not final victories and the great tragedy is not final defeats there arent any final victories or final defeats. Its the journey, its the deal. You stand up and do the best you can in the moments you have. And then you go on and live the next moment. Its going to be fine. Id give anything to be your age again, just to see whats going to happen. The last couple years, 20 planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to have sufficient distance from their suns and sufficient density that they might be able to contain life. Now thats the only thing that will ever finally unify us here. [laughter] pres. Clinton look at that. It doesnt matter. You dont have to have ultimate answers. Its the attitude, the approach. Do you believe that when the founders said we had to make a more perfect union, they meant there needs to be more of us and less of them . Every year, more of us, fewer of them. Every year, believing we can do better. You heard mark say my professor of ancient civilization, carol quigley, said that our civilization was the greatest because it believed that the future could always be better than the present, and that people had a personal and moral responsibility to make it so. Which translated into my 1992 speak, dont stop thinking about tomorrow. You can decide what it means for you, but believe me, whether youre a conservative or a liberal or a republican or a democrat, it doesnt matter as long as you believe that our common humanity matters most, as long as you welcome the opportunity to cooperate with people who dont look like you and always agree with you, but make up this vast, teeming sea of humanity that is breaking down all kinds of barriers and knowledge. Dont choke the future, lift it up. And dont ever be under the illusion that power can ever be the end of life and that there are permanent victories there arent. Except in systems that choke themselves off and die on the vine. America is a work in progress, always becoming. And dont forget that there is a reason this Great Institution is in both these colleges are ranked fourth in america in the importance of Community Service and Public Service. [applause] pres. Clinton you dont have to hold a Political Office to advance the public good. So, thats about all i have to say. [laughter] pres. Clinton what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences and it makes it possible for those differences to flourish. Diverse groups cooperating do better than homogenous ones trying to jam things down our throat, and they are capable of morphing and meeting new challenges. No one should be left behind, and no one should be denied the chance to exercise a responsible role. The future is full of challenges, but there are even more opportunities. Youre supposed to work all of that out. And theres a reason you are sitting on this lawn today. Think about what people were like the first time your first forebears of homosapiens stood up on the east african savanna 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. From that day to this, most people who have ever lived had no choice about how they would spend their waking hours. They had to struggle to put food on the table and support their children. And yet here you are, in one of the greatest institutions of Higher Education in a country that has 300 or 400 worldclass undergraduate institutions of Higher Education. The great microbiologist theo wilson says that its because we, along with ants, termites , and bees, are the greatest cooperative species in the history of life on our planet, and we have more potential and present more peril to the future because we have a conscience and consciousness, so were prone to arrogance, but full of unlimited potential. I would love to be your age just to see whats going to happen. So remember that no permanent victories, no permanent defeats, but a life of permanent possibility. As long as you remember those simple things. And the most important of all is , every single day, we should each find a way to expand the definition of us and shrink the definition of them. Because in the end, there is not enough difference to spend our life frightened about it. Good luck, and god bless you. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] at the end of the day, it does not matter the decision you make so much, because god is so allpowerful and so great that he can turn any decision you make into the right decision. It does not matter what decision you pick what law firm or what field of law you choose. He can turn a wrong answer into a right answer if he wants to. It is not the decision that matters. It is why you made that decision. And if you seek him in that decision, he will honor it, i promise you, he will honor it. I say these things to you because you may ask, why do you achieve this piece in all the stuff you talk about . I will let you know when i fully find out, because we struggle with that to this day. One is to simply accept that this is not a human thing, that achieving the piece that allows you to shine your light on the world is not something you are going to be able to accomplish. It is a grace. You pray for it, because it is given to you, as was mans original estate given to man. The other is to become more childlike. That is the advice i can give you not immature, childlike. What i mean is, i look at my own children. When they are very young, anything i asked them to do, they will do. I have a son who is almost six. He has become increasingly obsessed with football, being a football player, but he does not like to eat a lot, so i have convinced him, the more you eat, the better you will become, and he believes me. He believes me because he knows i love them. He believes me because he believes i would never want anything bad for him. He trusts what i tell him because he knows that of all the people on earth, not love him more than me. I love my son. How much more does god love you . So i would say to you to try to become more childlike. As my kids get older, they believe me less and less. Sometimes, i fear that the more educated we get, the dumber we get. That the more we embrace the wisdom of the world, the further away from the Simple Truths we get. Announcer former senator kelly ayotte delivered the commencement address to graduates of the university of new hampshires manchester campus. He talked about losing her reelection bid in november 2016 and the importance of learning from mistakes and failure. [applause] sen. Ayotte