Colleges’ Work Pays Off With Top Speakers

Of course Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would love to speak at his niece’s college graduation, the Army Intelligence folks were saying last summer. But there would be a few details to attend to.

He would need some 20 hotel rooms--some of them south-facing so the satellite equipment could be hung out the windows. Hand-drawn maps would be required, denoting precisely where the most powerful general in the world would step and where he would change his well-pressed clothes. And Harvey Mudd College in Claremont should definitely have a backup plan in case, you know, war broke out and he couldn’t make it.

“He was 50% confirmed by November, 80% confirmed by January, 95% by March and 99% confirmed by April,” said Leslie Baer, Harvey Mudd’s director of college relations, who spent nearly a year organizing the general’s May 18 address. “It’s a kind of experience of a lifetime--and it’s the kind you might not want to repeat for about a decade. More than likely, we won’t be trying to get President Clinton for the next commencement.”

The pomp, circumstance and general aura of goodwill surrounding college commencements this time of year often belies the grueling games of telephone tag, the letter-writing, deal-making, handshaking and even Machiavellian machinations used to land big-name, sometimes big-ego, speakers.

“I always thought I wouldn’t have to go through anything like this until my wedding,” said Teresa Magno, who as third-year class president helped bring Jesse Jackson to the UCLA School of Law, also May 18. “I’m sure that down the road I’m going to say it was worth it, but . . .”

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With 3,688 colleges and universities in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Education, competition is fierce to secure a marquee commencement speaker. California, with 138 campuses of higher education--not to mention the most votes in that most important college of all, the Electoral College--is a popular destination for speakers with a political agenda.

Even if few expect a landmark speech such as Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” address to tiny Westminster College in Missouri, here, as elsewhere, institutions vie for someone who will impart at least some lasting wisdom. They beg for someone who will lure the television cameras. And they sometimes duel over a speaker who will do both.

A minor ruckus broke out between Harvey Mudd and “a prestigious Southern California university,” which Baer declined to identify, when the latter attempted to lure away Shalikashvili to perform an ROTC commissioning ceremony. Baer, with permission of the general’s staff, told the rival to go fly a kite.

Big money sometimes helps lure big names, but mostly at private institutions. State universities are typically limited to paying expenses or a modest honorarium. And government employees--from politicians to U.S. Supreme Court justices--may not accept gifts worth more than $20. “And they still have to fill out a [disclosure] form,” said a White House spokeswoman.

Charmed by a stuffed Bruin bear she was given after speaking to the UCLA Law School in 1995, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno requested a bill for the bear and sent a check, said law school spokeswoman Karen Nikos.

What often really counts when it comes to luring a speaker, though, is a close, personal connection.

Scripps College President Nancy Bekavac first met this year’s speaker, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, in 1973, said Andrea Jarrell, Scripps director of public relations. Bekavac was editor of the Yale Law Review, and Clark, recently nominated by Clinton to be commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, reviewed author David Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest” for her. They later worked together on the White House Fellows Commission.

All of which helped, along with months of effort, in bringing the general to the Scripps campus in Claremont last week. None of which could quite explain to inherently nervous military security personnel how or why both Clark and Shalikashvili, two of the most powerful military leaders in the world, wound up in the same small California town on the same day giving speeches an hour and a half apart at schools a stone’s throw--let alone a bomb’s blast--away from each other.

“It was pretty ironic,” Jarrell said. “We needed to explain how this came about.”

But no matter how close the connection and no matter how excited a prominent alum is to be fed and feted by the old alma mater, the rule of thumb among university employees assigned to bring in such speakers seems to be: If they’re worth having, getting them is not going to be easy.

A cloud cover over Florida all the way back in February was enough to get nervous officials of Cal State Northridge’s College of Engineering and Computer Science fearing that their well-planned commencement this coming Thursday might be derailed.

Dianne Appel, the college’s director of development, followed every development as the crew of the space shuttle Discovery carried out a $350-million overhaul of the Hubble Telescope. But mostly she wanted the shuttle to land on time. On board was her commencement speaker, pilot and Cal State Northridge alum Scott “Doc” Horowitz. And Appel worried that a delayed landing--or even worse, a landing at Edwards Air Force Base--would postpone the exhaustive NASA debriefing, which in turn would scramble the ensuing weeks of meticulously orchestrated appointments . . . which in turn could have kept him from his engagement at Cal State Northridge.

Even though the events were more than three months apart, Appel--who had been on the phone to NASA “every single day” for a year in an effort to get Horowitz--said school officials “were holding our breath, literally.”

So she was relieved when the clouds parted and her speaker-to-be lit up the nighttime sky at 8,500 mph, setting the spacecraft down softly at Cape Canaveral.

He is expected to address the Class of ’97 as planned.

Of course, former congressman and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta seemed set to address students at UC Santa Cruz on Friday, only to have a campus labor dispute prompt him to pull out at the last minute. Testing California’s political waters for a possible gubernatorial run, Panetta still planned to speak Saturday at Cal State Monterey Bay, just down the coast.

Campus politics also led to a last-minute change at Chapman University in Orange, where the school administration replaced Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) with wealthy Republican donor and university trustee John Crean as today’s commencement speaker.

It was students on the Chapman selection panel, including one member of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, who protested that Sanchez, a Chapman graduate and the county’s first Democratic member of Congress in 12 years, was too political. She beat veteran Orange County leader Robert K. Dornan for his congressional seat in a tight race last fall during a campaign plagued by allegations of voter fraud. But the university’s provost has denied that political pressure influenced the change.

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The attempt to round up an impressive speaker at the UCLA Law School, historically selected by a small group of student leaders and college officials, began early last year with an experiment in democracy.

Class president Magno decided it would be a nice application of the constitutional law they had all been studying to poll the student body.

“Democracy,” Magno says now, “is overrated.”

After weeding out suggestions that included Bugs Bunny, Oprah Winfrey and Hollywood hunk Keanu Reeves, a steering committee mailed requests to a host of biggies, including U.S. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sandra Day O’Connor, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, of course, the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

All but Jackson--who was actually No. 8 on the list--declined the offer.

Then came the complaints from students who disagreed with Jackson’s views on everything from affirmative action to Israeli-Palestinian relations, and threatened to boycott the event.

Then there was the issue of first-class air fare, which the public university could not pay for but which Jackson’s staff, according to Magno, insisted upon. And there was a disagreement over the choice of hotels.

“It became very sticky,” Magno said.

But Jackson showed, apparently had a fine time, and gave Magno, who delivered a speech of her own, a standing ovation.

Still, there was some disappointment over the fact that only one local TV station was on hand to capture it all.

Media coverage shouldn’t be a problem at UC San Diego. Neither was finding a speaker. The biggest one of all telephoned and offered to swing by June 14 to deliver a major address on race relations, one of four such speeches President Clinton is making this commencement season.

He has already spoken at Morgan State University in Maryland--on the same day the two generals were in California--and is scheduled to hit West Point on Saturday and on June 6 to deliver one of those addresses arranged through close personal ties--at Sidwell Friends High School in Washington, where one Chelsea Clinton is to graduate en route to Stanford University. Of course, there would be a few details to attend to.

“Everything can change after the Secret Service does their walk-through,” said Delores Davies, a university spokeswoman. “You have to remain flexible with something like this.”