It was the spring of 1968, and the nation’s colleges were convulsed in protest. Students were barricading themselves in buildings, and antiwar demonstrations were growing violent. At Wellesley College, a group of students were threatening to go on a hunger strike if the administration did not agree to recruit more black faculty members and students.
In an effort to avert the strike, administrators convened an all-campus meeting so students could voice their grievances. When it devolved into a shouting match, Hillary Rodham, the student-government president, stepped in. Acting as a mediator between the administration and the students, she brokered a compromise, and the hunger strike was called off.
Over the next 40 years, Hillary Rodham Clinton would return to the role of negotiator again and again. But it was at Wellesley that she first practiced the art of what she calls “principled compromise.” And it was in college, at the height of the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement, that the future presidential candidate became passionate about social issues.
Goldwater Girl
Hillary Rodham Clinton was raised Republican in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill. As a ninth grader, she read Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, and when Goldwater ran for president, three years later, she was a Goldwater Girl, “right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan “AuH⊃0,” she wrote in her autobiography, Living History.
At the same time, she was introduced to liberalizing experiences by her Methodist youth minister, the Rev. Donald G. Jones. With her youth group, she visited black and Hispanic churches in inner-city Chicago, babysat the children of migrant workers, and went to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. The experiences “opened her eyes to a wider world than she was used to,” says Mr. Jones, a professor emeritus of theological and social ethics at Drew University. She was also elected vice president of her high school’s junior class.
She applied to Wellesley and to Smith College at the urging of two young teachers who had graduated from those institutions, and chose Wellesley on the basis of the photographs in its brochure. The campus’s Lake Waban, she later said, reminded her of Lake Winola, in Pennsylvania, where her family had vacationed.
Emerging Leader
When Ms. Clinton arrived at Wellesley, in 1965, she felt “lonely, overwhelmed” and “out of place” amid classmates who seemed richer, smarter, and more worldly, she wrote in her autobiography. A month into the first semester, she called her parents and said she wanted to come home. Her mother told her not to be a quitter.
With time, Ms. Clinton came to flourish in Wellesley’s intense, competitive atmosphere. With no men around, she and her classmates “felt freer to take risks, make mistakes, even fail in front of one another,” she wrote.
But as liberating as Wellesley was for women of her generation, it was still a somewhat paternalistic place. Women had to wear skirts to the dining halls and on trips into town. There was a 1 a.m. curfew on weekends. Boys were allowed in the dormitories only on Sunday afternoons.
As student-government president in 1968, Ms. Clinton persuaded the administration to rescind those outdated rules and treat the students as adults. She also lobbied the college to reduce the number of required classes and to sponsor an Upward Bound program for inner-city youths. But it was her intervention in the dispute over minority enrollments that many of her classmates remember most.
“To me, that’s what made it clear that some day she was going to be somebody,” said one classmate, Jane M. Moss, who now teaches French and women’s studies at Colby College. “It showed she had insights into how to effect change in a more constructive way.”
Ms. Clinton also got involved in national issues, marching for civil rights and organizing teach-ins to protest the Vietnam War. But she was not nearly as radical as some of her peers, preferring compromise over confrontation. Mr. Jones, who has stayed in touch with Ms. Clinton, attributes her more measured approach to her conservative upbringing.
“Deep in her character, she is a circumspect, prudent person,” he says.
Controversial Thesis
Still, as a college student, Ms. Clinton was distancing herself from the Republican Party of her childhood. She disagreed with its policies on civil rights and Vietnam, and she didn’t like the conservative turn the party was taking. By the time she was a junior, she was spending weekends in New Hampshire campaigning for the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy.
Alan H. Schecter, Ms. Clinton’s faculty adviser at Wellesley, says he knew her political transformation was complete when she returned from a Washington internship talking about government antipoverty programs.
“If you’re interested in having the government solve the legal problems of the poor, you’re obviously not a conservative,” he says.
Mr. Schecter suggested that she do a thesis comparing the government’s antipoverty programs with the “up from the people” approach of Saul D. Alinsky, an antiestablishment activist whom many consider the father of community organizing.
In her thesis, Ms. Clinton praised Alinsky’s ideas but questioned his effectiveness, concluding that government programs might accomplish more in the long run. Later, when her husband was elected president, Ms. Clinton would ask Wellesley to lock up the thesis, perhaps fearing that her political enemies would use it to cast her as a radical. Wellesley unlocked it when the Clintons left the White House, and it can now be read in the Wellesley library.
Advocate for the Poor
The most famous of Ms. Clinton’s college writings is her commencement speech, in which she spoke of her generation’s lack of trust in government institutions and defended the “indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.” The speech was reprinted in Life alongside a photo of Ms. Clinton in her Coke-bottle glasses, her fingers interlaced introspectively.
Ms. Clinton was already well known when she enrolled at Yale Law School, in the fall of 1969, one of 27 women in a class of 235. She was viewed by some as a voice of her generation.
At the time, Yale University had what Carl Bernstein describes in A Woman in Charge, his biography of Ms. Clinton, as an “almost dizzying antiestablishment ethic.” During her first week on the campus, students took over the main quadrangle, declaring it a “liberated zone.” Later that year, as the campus prepared for a May Day rally in support of eight Black Panthers on trial for murder in New Haven, Conn., demonstrators torched the basement of the law library.
Yet Ms. Clinton, in keeping with her upbringing, would continue to favor engagement over disruption. When the library was set ablaze, she rushed to join a bucket brigade to put out the fire. And when the Panthers’ trial began, she and other law students monitored the proceedings and reported perceived government abuses to the American Civil Liberties Union.
“She was never a bomb thrower,” says Nancy Y. Bekavac, a classmate who recently retired as president of Scripps College.
In 1970 she met Marian Wright Edelman, a Yale law graduate who would become a lifelong friend. That summer she went to work for Ms. Edelman conducting research for a Senate hearing on the education and health of migrant children.
The experience marked a turning point for Ms. Clinton, who decided to focus her career on working for children and the poor. After graduating she went on to become a staff lawyer for the Children’s Defense Fund, which Ms. Edelman ran. Later, as first lady, she would push for the creation of an Early Head Start program and a federally supported health-insurance plan for children.
Senate Career
As a senator from New York, Ms. Clinton has continued such advocacy. From her seat on the education committee, she has focused on making college more accessible for nontraditional students and on expanding protections for student-loan borrowers.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is chairman of the education committee, said in an interview that Senator Clinton “has maintained an interest in the committee’s work even while very engaged in her presidential campaign.”
Provisions of her Nontraditional Student Success Act were incorporated into the budget-reconciliation bill that President Bush signed into law in September. The provisions made Pell Grants more widely available, and allowed working students to deduct more of their earnings when calculating their expected contribution to college costs.
Meanwhile, pieces of her Borrower Bill of Rights, which would require lenders to provide more disclosure to student borrowers, were added to the Higher Education Act reconciliation that the Senate passed in July. Ms. Clinton offered that bill even before New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo began his bruising investigation of the student-loan industry.
Critics say Ms. Clinton’s proposals to expand student aid would do nothing to hold down rising college costs and could even drive up tuition. The senator has proposed raising the maximum Pell Grant to $12,600 over the next five years.
“This is an effort to curry favor with middle-class voters by offering them something that just makes the underlying problem — inflation — worse,” says Neal P. McCluskey, a policy analyst with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, who argues that colleges respond with tuition hikes each time the federal government increases student aid.
While Ms. Clinton has yet to offer her higher-education platform, she is expected to pursue policies in the same spirit as the legislation she has offered in the Senate.
Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, says “the consistent thread” in Ms. Clinton’s Senate career “is that she’s been very vocal about expanding access to higher education to low-income and minority students.”
“Her whole career moves her in that direction.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 54, Issue 7, Page A22