 President Clinton it's a great honor to be introduced by you and to welcome you here to Berkeley. Thank you for inventing new ways at every stage of your life to contribute to the public good. I want to thank Chelsea Clinton for her work in leveraging the talent of America's youth and I want to thank and I want to thank Richard Blum for his exceptional stewardship of the university where he is a great benefactor and alum. I want to thank all of you our guests for being here this evening. On behalf of all here who love this university and have made it the work of their lives welcome to Berkeley. Now as President Clinton recognized when he extended the work of CGI to universities even the greatest ideas of our elders cannot last unless they are received and advanced by society's youth. This is the mission of universities. We are the cornerstones of society's effort to improve itself but as you just heard we are also fragile. We depend on the cooperation and support of the society we serve to sustain our mission. Cooperation is an indispensable skill. It's the basis for all progress but progress is not a given and I'm concerned that in the United States today we are losing our ability to cooperate. I see this trend in society's declining support of our public goods. Now the mark of a public good is that it makes everyone better off. Among the public goods we've cherished in this country are those goods that make up the American dream. Economic vitality, professional opportunity and social mobility. These are the quintessential American beliefs that talent and hard work can take you wherever you want to go. In American history it is our public universities more perhaps than any other institution that have supported these public goods and nourished the American dream. One of our finest contemporary novelists Marilyn Robinson has called public research universities still America's best idea. This idea she recently wrote emerged from a glorious sense of the possible through the spread of learning. If it seems to be failing now that may be because we have forgotten what universities are for. They are a tribute and an invitation to the young who can and should make the world new out of the unmapped and unbounded resource of their minds. Now ever since Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act to create universities of and for the people public universities have had the special mission of combining knowledge and democracy and thus offering excellence and opportunity to all. Today America's top 20 public universities enroll three times three times as many students as the top 20 private universities and the top public universities have offered not just access but also excellence. At Berkeley we have produced more Nobel Prize winners than all but three countries. We have played a pivotal role in making the California economy the most dynamic in the world. We are ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and we produce these world-class results at a far lower cost than our private peers. Our poor student administrative costs are one sixth of Harvard's even as we educate many more low-income students who require more services and support. In fact, in fact Berkeley has as many low-income students as the whole Ivy League does. 40% of our students come from families earning less than 50,000 a year and they pay no tuition. A New York Times ranking of top universities by affordability called the University of California system and I quote an upward mobility engine for those who attend. We have had the freedom and the resources to play that role because of the shared conviction that social mobility is a public good, that skilled professionals are a public good, that scientific research is a public good and that therefore public universities are a public good and deserve public support but unfortunately that conviction is not shared by everyone. The leading public research universities in the country have seen their funding drop over the last 30 years. States used to spend on average 20% of their budgets on higher education and now they spend about 10%. In the 1980s Berkeley received nearly 66% of its funding from the state. By the early 2000s we received 33% and today we receive only 13%. A number of reasons could be given for the decline but I'm worried about one reason in particular. We in the United States have begun to politicize our public goods. Recognizing and supporting a public good brings the country together but if you benefit from division you don't want to bring the country together. If you find the right audience and say that so-called public good doesn't benefit everybody it benefits only a few you also say it doesn't benefit you. And that's when society begins turning its back on its public goods. It can happen in any sphere if it continues though to happen to universities then at some point knowledge and democracy will part ways and we will move closer to a stratified society that allocates opportunity according to birth and wealth and nothing else. But fortunately I see much cause for optimism. I have great faith in the students I meet here at Berkeley and everywhere else. You have a passion for change. You seek inclusion. You shun division. You form partnerships across political boundaries and across national borders. By building a global community you are advancing an ideal long advocated by a wise elder of yours. Back in 1991 Bill Clinton broke into the presidential campaign and he said this and I quote American politics is broken. The system is paralyzed. People need a new choice based on old values that offers opportunity, demands responsibility and gives citizens more say because we're all part of one community. We're all in this together and we're going to go up or we'll go down together. Now that message won him as we all know the White House and in one form or another he's been saying it his entire life and he's saying it again to us today through the Clinton global initiative and with all your innovations and idealism you are saying it right back to us and that makes me optimistic for our future. Thank you for everything you do.