Remarks at the Dedication of a New University of California Campus in Irvine

Governor Brown, President Kerr, Mr. Carter, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Dutton, Congressman Miller, Congressman Utt, Congressman Hanna, distinguished guests on the platform, members of the Board of Regents, ladies and gentlemen:

I have been in California now less than 30 hours and I think I already know why you are number one in the Nation in so many fields. Your leaders have the vision and your people have the vigor that put California on top.

Governor Brown, I predict that is where California is going to stay.

There seems to be a sense of urgency in California that translates good words into good deeds.

Men have been talking about the importance of education in America ever since Thomas Jefferson once said: "If you expect a nation to be ignorant and free, you expect what never was and never will be."

California is not just talking about education-you are doing something about it. This campus is a perfect example. It seems, in fact, that every time I come to California you build a new college. The last time, only 3 months ago, you were dedicating a new campus at Santa Cruz. Today, the university adds another campus at Irvine. If you keep up this pace, President Kerr, you are going to have a lot of ceremonies like this between now and November.

Urgent problems demand urgent programs. By 1970 California must provide desks and teachers for more than a million additional students. In the next 6 years you must build as many schools, teach as many students, and spend as much money on education as you have during the past 80 years.

I know something about this State. I know something about the West. I know that you have the concern, the courage, and the commitment to get this job done.

You will not be alone. Education is a national need, and I want to assure you that as long as I am President, the education of your children is going to receive top priority by the men who lead your Nation.

In the last few months I have signed three education bills into law, in addition to one library bill. One of them will build college classrooms for hundreds of thousands of students, construct community colleges and technical institutes, and improve graduate schools and college libraries.

But that is just a beginning. In the next decade our college population will almost double, and we must provide them with facilities and faculties second to none in the world. I believe we will so provide them.

I expect higher education in America to cross many new frontiers in that decade, and one of the most critical is the frontier of the city life.

A century ago we were a nation of farms and farmers. Eighty percent of our people lived in rural areas. We had to cultivate a wilderness of western lands.

Congress passed legislation then to apply the science of our learning to the secrets of our agriculture, and our colleges and our universities set out to change our farms. Well, the results were revolutionary--so revolutionary that today one farmworker produces what six produced a hundred years ago.

Now 70 percent of our people live in urban areas, like Los Angeles. Their needs are immense. But just as our colleges and universities changed the future of our farms a century ago, so they can help change the future of our cities.

I foresee the day when an urban extension service, operated by universities across the country, will do for urban America what the Agricultural Extension Service has done for rural America. And I am asking the United States Commissioner of Education to meet with the leaders of education--men like your own Clark Kerr--to see how that can come to pass.

All our hopes for peace depend on the kind of society that we build here in the United States. And that, in turn--the kind of society we build--rests on our system of education. I do not intend for us to settle for an uneasy peace for the world, or an inferior society for America, or an inadequate education for our children.

We are on the frontiers of a new America. Ahead of us is the challenge to make our system work, make it work in a dangerous and difficult period; to demonstrate to a watching and waiting world that democracy, and not communism, represents the way to the future.

Just the day before he died, our beloved late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote: "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today."

I have come to California to ask you to throw off your doubts about America.

Help us demonstrate to the world that people of compassion and commitment can free their fellow citizens from the bonds of injustice, and the prisons of poverty, and the chains of ignorance.

Help us--help us to open the doors of America's abundance and freedom's promise to every man, whatever his race, or his region, or his religion.

Help us to build a strong--and vital--and progressive society.

In education, in health, in transportation, in every field of human endeavor let us move forward. Let us do our dead level best, knowing that "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."