Back to School
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Back to School At Wellesley, Hillary (’69) gets some respect. BY JONATHAN V. LAST Wellesley, Massachusetts It was a tough week for Hillary Clinton trying to face down a Democratic field that...
...On Thursday, she played the overturning of the “twofoot rule” for laughs: “It’s a rule that I and many of my classmates became actually nostalgic forwhen we had collegeaged children of our own...
...Clinton’s speech on May 31, 1969, is the stuff of legend at Wellesley—portions of it were quoted on T-shirts at the rally, and the candidate herself made reference to it several times...
...In 1969, young Hillary Rodham became the fi rst student ever to speak at Wellesley’s graduation, through a series of what with hindsight might be called Clintonian machinations...
...It was, of course, not the fi rst time Clinton had addressed the school...
...Kristin Ruben, a Wellesley sophomore majoring in geosciences, was camped out in front of Alumnae Hall at 5:45 in the morning last Thursday for the chance to see Clinton’s 10:30 appearance...
...It had a core curriculum and rules of decorum—curfews, no boys in the dorms except on Sundays and, on those occasions, two out of four feet were to be kept on the fl oor with the door left open a crack...
...There was spontaneous clapping and cheering in the line, the Drexel debate both out of sight and out of mind...
...In other words, she wants to take credit for being a student radical while at the same time hinting that as president she won’t do for America what she did for Wellesley...
...Clinton’s remarks at Wellesley this time were more on-message...
...She talked about how America’s youth had stepped up to the plate anyhow, with applications to Teach for America, AmeriCorps, and the Peace Corps soaring...
...The result is a college where today girls can major in Peace and Justice Studies or Women’s Studies...
...Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...She claimed that “there is no military solution” for Iraq because of the tangle of tribal and sectarian rivalries there...
...And really, who could blame them...
...If the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere...
...Not mentioned were those who chose to actually fi ght for our nation by enlisting in the armed forces...
...Wellesley, like other serious, upper-crust women’s colleges, used to be in the business of supervising its students both intellectually and socially...
...The coverage was almost universally fawning...
...But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation...
...She rang the torture bell, warned about global warming, gave a shout-out to Al Gore, and proclaimed that “If George Bush doesn’t end this war while he is president, when I am president, I will...
...Looking to play peacemaker, Clinton, who was then president of the student government, met with Adams, who said her chief concern was that she didn’t know who the students would choose and whether that person could be trusted to act with decorum...
...BY JONATHAN V. LAST Wellesley, Massachusetts It was a tough week for Hillary Clinton trying to face down a Democratic field that had decided to go negative...
...My generation,” she admitted, “is in danger of being the fi rst ever to leave America worse off than when we found it...
...The students applauded both sentiments with equal fervor...
...The speech brought her national recognition: television appearances, radio interviews, even notice in Life magazine...
...And, she added, she was confi dent her grandfather would attend...
...Wellesley is certainly worse off than it was before the Class of ’69 with its president, Hillary Rodham...
...With a Wellesley graduate running for president, there hasn’t been this much excitement in feminism since Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls came to Washington in 2005 to lobby against private fuel storage...
...The only truly offensive moment came after Hillary lamented that in the wake of 9/11, President Bush asked Americans to go shopping...
...There was the usual anti-Bush diatribe—“[the president] has undermined women’s rights and gay rights and appointed Supreme Court justices who’ve chipped away at reproductive rights, undermined equal pay, and turned back the clock on school integration...
...As Clinton explained in Living History, “We pressured the college administration to remove the in loco parentis regulations, which they finally did when I was college government President...
...It was pretty much the standard fare, though perhaps not as perfectly prowithdrawal as the crowd might have preferred...
...And the less said about the culture of sexual permissiveness that has been fostered at Wellesley and elsewhere, the better...
...Others began arriving around 7:30, and the line to greet Clinton in her triumphant return to her alma mater eventually topped a thousand, mostly young women, many wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I can be president too” and “Make History...
...Coincidentally, Clinton explained, the students had already chosen her...
...An early-morning passerby thought something might be wrong and asked Ruben if she was all right...
...As she explains in her autobiography, Living History, her close friend Eleanor Acheson, granddaughter of Dean, decided that it was imperative that the school allow a student to speak...
...A liberation enabling each of us to fulfi ll our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves...
...But she still wasn’t entirely coherent...
...Scarcely a minute later, she promised to commit troops to Darfur and Burma and to “create real consequences for anyone who continues the bloodshed or obstructs the peace process...
...I’m not so sure that eliminating both course requirements and quasi-parental supervision represented unmitigated progress,” she wrote in Living History...
...So far, both groups seem to believe her...
...Acheson declared “that if the request was denied, she would personally lead an effort to stage a countercommencement...
...But in the midst of the turmoil, her supporters remained unfazed...
...She insisted that we must end this “reckless spending,” but in the course of a brief speech pledged $50 billion for AIDS research, a $1 billion “Green Building Fund,” and universal health care...
...That change coincided with the elimination of a required curriculum that students also deemed oppressive...
...Following the grand tradition of college administrators the world over, Adams acquiesced...
...She wasn’t quite as polished in those days: Within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs...
...Clinton also attacked Bush’s profl igate spending, charging that “he’s run up our national debt to $9 trillion so every baby born today starts life with $30,000 dollars of debt on his or her tiny shoulders...
...Acheson made her demand to Wellesley’s president, Ruth Adams, who refused...
...Even Clinton seems to understand that her accomplishments at Wellesley might have had unpleasant, unintended consequences...
...She then mentioned a student-created sustainable food initiative at one local college, a benefi t concert for Darfur put on at another, and a nearby university’s attempt to cut water usage...
...She turned in a sub-par debate performance and then one of her donors suggested, on a high-profile conference call, that Tim Russert “should be shot...
...The revealing moment came late...
...It’s the same circle she’s trying to square in her campaign: to convince liberal Democrats that she’s one of them while she reassures moderates that she understands how the real world works...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 9
