Thank you very much. I told Senator Pryor I was not only here, I heard his whole speech. Dr. Sugg, Dr. Bruce, Dean Rutherford, Freddye Petett, Lena Moore, Mrs. Beebe, Mayor Dailey, ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class. First of all, I’d like to thank you for inviting me to give this address. I’d especially like to thank David Pryor for helping to start this school. I doubt if we would be here had it not been for his willingness to serve one more time. I thank Skip Rutherford and Tom Bruce and President Sugg for taking what was just an idea that we could actually build an institution around the concept of public service and bringing it to fruition. I am grateful to the faculty and staff of the school, the University of Arkansas, and the Presidential Center. This may be the first graduation ceremony in history where the commencement speaker is as excited as the graduates. You are the first in the nation to hold a degree called Master in Public Service.

When I left the White House, I wanted to do a number of things. I wanted to build this library. I hoped it would win an international environmental award. I wanted it to be accessible to people so they could come and see that there are consequences to the ideas and policies that public officials pursue. But I especially wanted to establish this school to inspire more young people to pursue careers in public service and to give them the tools to do it better, because I believe it is a noble calling. I believe that doing it well makes a world of difference, as we see in the United States and around the world when it is not done well. And I believe that dedication to the common good is critical to meeting the challenges of the interdependent world, in which the graduates will live and raise their children, in which we have to have a security policy, but in which, because we are interdependent, we cannot possibly ever kill, jail, or occupy all of our adversaries. Therefore, we have to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. We have to be constantly searching for American renewal, and finally, we have to be building communities in which we revere our differences, but we believe our common humanity matters more.

The graduates go out into a world that is infinitely different than the one I entered as a college graduate nearly forty years ago -- or as a law school graduate just a few years later. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, not even 20 years ago yet, we have seen an explosion of democracies around the world. For the first time in history, more than half the world’s people live in governments they voted in.

We have seen an explosion in information technology that has changed everything and brought us closer together. I have a cousin in North Arkansas who for many years played chess with a guy in Australia once a week on the Internet. They took turns deciding who had to stay up all night. The point is we are all connected in ways that make all kinds of things possible -- mostly good, but not all. The 9/11 terrorists used information technology and open borders and easy travel and easy access to information to learn how to fly planes -- though not how to take off or land them -- and turn them into giant chemical weapons. There are sophisticated technologies being used in basic ways to kill lots of people in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There are also computers that are enabling us to get information to children in poor areas who would not have other ways of learning. There are technologies which have made it possible for us to keep untold numbers of people alive in the developing world who would otherwise not live.

On World AIDS Day, I was in India, and I was able to announce that we are now going to be able to treat children who have AIDS for $60 a year. That’s only 16 cents a day. When I started three years ago, the price was $600, then we got it down to $190, and now it’s $60, all because of developments in modern production and distribution technology, and because in an interdependent world, people believe that they are responsible for their neighbors half a world away. The French impose a little airline tax to raise money and nineteen other countries help them, and that will generate enough money to keep these kids alive. We are all being pulled closer together in ways that are positive and negative.

The third thing that has happened is that you can engage in public service without being on the public payroll more than ever before, because of the rise of non-governmental organizations like my Foundation and millions upon millions of others around the world. When I became President in 1993, there were no non-governmental organizations in Russia. Today there are 63,000 -- so many that President Putin is trying to put the clamps on them. I wish he wouldn’t do that, but it’s a high-class problem compared to having no NGOs. There are a quarter of a million registered in China. There were none when I became President. There are almost certainly twice as many that are unregistered. There are probably a million non-governmental organizations operating in India, and there are many here. One of the finest in the world is our next door neighbor, the Heifer Foundation. The Gates Foundation, as all of you know, is filthy rich. It has $30 billion-plus and Warren Buffet’s about to make it twice as rich. There are also many you don’t know about where people have almost no money and depend on others to help them. With a little money, they can make all the difference in the lives of large numbers of people. So there are more opportunities for public service than ever before. Because all the graduates here want to make a difference, you should feel good about the fact that the trends of the last twenty years have given you much more power to do so.

I think it’s important to point out that the lives that you lived before you came here embodied the power of public service. Some of you came to this school as former members of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, or Teach for America. All of you have participated in service projects here, many of you in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, something I especially appreciate. For some reason, all of you are driven by the desire to change the way things are -- in your neighborhood or around the world. You have participated in service projects in the Arkansas Delta, and in international summer internships or internships at home. You have put your studies into practice, and in so doing, you have changed lives for the better. That is what this school is all about -- helping to give people the tools to improve lives and strengthen the bonds of humanity across different cultures, countries, and communities.

I have been in politics in one way or another for about forty years now. It was forty years ago that I first met young David and Barbara Pryor when they were running for Congress, and I was working on a gubernatorial campaign. Forty years ago. The memory of seeing him get out of a car in south Arkansas is as vivid to me now as it was a month after it happened. I have loved every single year. About the only thing I can tell you about aging is that I don’t remember what year certain things occurred. I have the clearest memory in the world of things that happened to me, but I think they happened three years before or after they in fact did. Otherwise, I’m doing pretty well. For those forty years, I have seen America make great progress and go through great upheavals. Always, most of us on this platform and our friends were fighting against a certain kind of politics -- politics that sought to divide us and to distract us from the real issues that people in public life can affect. Politics in which people sought to gain power by demonizing opponents, denigrating them, and making them seem somehow less worthy. I have seen the coverage of politics often polluted by an obsessive concern with positioning and power in what people say rather than what politicians do and what the consequences of their actions are on people today and in the future. America has been well-served by its conservative and its progressive traditions when we have emphasized philosophy over ideology, emphasized evidence over attack, emphasized argument over assertion. We have managed over all these years to meet the challenges of every age and to emerge stronger.

You leave this place to find some way to serve the public at a time when it appears that we are recovering our bearings and getting back to the idea that whether we are conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, it really does matter what the facts are. It really does matter what policies will do to the lives of ordinary people, that argument is better than attack, and that the public interest is a more noble goal than the advancement of various particular ones. In the end, I hope your life in public service, however you pursue it, will be governed by a simple test. Were the people you sought to serve better off when you quit than when you started?

You can read many books about contemporary politics and many people’s musings, and relatively rarely will you see that simple test articulated or applied. Take it from me, forty years pass in the blink of an eye, and after forty years, that’s how you’ll judge yourself. You will want to know not that you made all the difference, because you’ll make mistakes. You will fail. There will be circumstances that you just simply can’t control. Real life will intrude on you -- all your demons and passions and dreams and nightmares. At the end of it all, if you can say that the people you sought to serve are better off when you stopped than when you started, it will all have been worth it and more.

I think before I close I should say that at times like this, when we have achieved something through hard work and effort, we are tempted to believe that we did it on our own, or as one wag used to say, “every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself.” I have had an improbable life these last forty years. Looking back on it, I think not very much of it was due to my own God-given abilities, and far more due to the influence of my family, my teachers, my mentors, my friends, the people who helped me when I was down, and liked me when I messed up as well as when I did well. As you leave today, I hope you take some time to express your gratitude to those who inspired you to come to this place today. You leave here with a degree that so far is unique, with an experience that I hope has been enriching, and with an enormous opportunity and a great responsibility to help to prove that together we can meet any challenge. While our differences are interesting and make life far more fascinating than it otherwise would be, our common humanity matters more. I wish you infinite success in serving that common humanity.

Thank you very much.