DEAR Penners: This is a LONG post. I have edited the following:
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INDEPENDENT COLLEGES
(Feb 7. 1996)
2:28 P.M. EST
In this speech, Clinton speaks about economic and social trends
and the importance of education for his 'poly-annaish' view of
the "future" for "America." I thought some of us might be
interested in seeing these kinds of arguments, "from the horse's
mouth." Perhaps I'm wasting my and our time, but, in that case
there's always the delete key.
THE PRESIDENT:
If I might, I would like to take just a few moments
today to try to put the struggles that you and I are engaged in,
to not only keep open the doors of college for all Americans but
to widen those doors, in a larger historic context. In my State
of the Union address I said I thought that America had entered a
great age of possibility, and I believe that. I believe that the
American people who are poised to take advantage of it will have
more opportunities to live out their dreams than any generation
of Americans every has. We also know, perplexingly, that this is
an age of great challenge in which huge numbers of Americans feel
deeply frustrated and worried that not only they, but their
children, will not have the chance to live out their dreams.
How could both these things coexist at the same
time? How could there be so much good economic news, and so much
troubling economic news? How could there be good news on the
social front and troubling news on the social front?
It is, I am convinced, endemic to the nature of this
moment in our history, which I believe is most like what happened
to us more or less a hundred years ago when we went through the
transformation from being a rural and agricultural society into a
more urbanized, more industrial society. And now we're moving
into an age dominated by information and technology and the
markets of the global village.
The nature of work has changed and that helps you
[colleges and universities] in your enterprise because we now
have -- almost all work contains more mind and less body, more
information and more technology, and is changing more rapidly so
you not only need to know more, you need to be able to learn
more. The nature of work is changing and there is no sign that
the rate of change and the direction of change will do anything
but speed up.
The nature of work organizations are also changing.
You have more and more people who are self-employed, more and
more people who can now work at home because there are computer
hook-ups. The largest and most bureaucratic and most top-down
organizations tend to be slimming down, pushing decisions down,
and getting rid of a lot of people in the middle of the
organizations that used to hand orders and information up and
down the food chain of the enterprise. And, again, that can be
good, but it can be severely disruptive if you're 50 years old
and you've got three kids to send to college and you've just been
told that your Fortune 500 company doesn't need you anymore.
We see the change in the nature of work. The
encouraging thing is that in the last three years, more jobs have
been created by businesses owned by women alone than have been
eliminated by the Fortune 500 companies. But they're different.
They're smaller, they're more scattered about. They are less
secure in a traditional sense. So work is changing and work
organizations are changing.
EDITORIAL: What about the wages and benefits in these new jobs?
The success the US economy and people had in moving from an
agricultural to an industrial society occurred only after a few
decades of suffering (the 1920s and 1930s) for the new industrial
working majority followed by success in the boom years of 1945-
1972 --- a success in large part based on the high wages won by
the successful unionization drive of the 1930s and the low
unemployment years of the 1940s and 1960s. Isn't this good
historical evidence for a high wage strategy in the current
period of transition. Even though he "supports" raising the
minimum wage he never says a word about it to this group ...
maybe because a lot of them outrageously exploit their non-
academic staff with miserable salaries and no unionization!
And, finally, the nature of our markets are
changing. The markets for financing and the markets for goods
and services are increasingly global, increasingly rapid and, on
occasion, ruthless because of their ability to seek the area of
greatest opportunity in a split second. And all of these things
have opened up vast new opportunities, but impose great new
challenges on our ability to maintain old-fashioned values and to
maintain a sense of national community as all these changes
proliferate and put pressures on all of our institutions to pull
apart and break down a
