White House rivals share Yale legacy

 
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut—Next week’s US presidential election will be followed with more than usual interest in the corridors of Yale University, which counts both President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry among its alumni.

“The existence of a competition between two Yale men is not going unnoticed by our undergraduates who would like to be political leaders in the future,” said William Foltz, chair of the university’s International Affairs Council.

“I don’t detect much support for Mr. Bush on the campus,” Foltz said.

One of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country with some 11,000 students, Yale has traditionally been seen as a Democrat-leaning school.

The university has produced four living US presidents: Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and the current White House incumbent.

Yale Students for Bush chair, Robert Chung, said he would not be surprised if a majority of Yale voters cast their ballots for Kerry, although he took issue with the university’s liberal image.

“The reason, I believe, that Yale is seen as a very liberal school is that the liberals are the noisiest group on campus,” Chung said. “They attract a lot of attention.”

Lowell Levin, a retired professor who taught at the university when Bush and Kerry were both students, identified the Democratic senator from Massachusetts as the more typical Yale man.

“Kerry has a demeanor which is more sophisticated,” Levin said.

“Bush tries hard to appeal to a different group by behaving and talking in a certain way and putting down literacy as an unimportant factor. He claims he doesn’t read newspapers . . . that kind of thing,” he said.

Neither candidate harps on about his time at Yale, which along with other so-called Ivy League universities like Princeton and Harvard has an elitist image associated with blue-blooded New England families.

“He and I, we went to the same university. We are both very privileged,” Kerry said in one rare reference. “He thinks it’s entitlement.”

Yale was founded in 1701 in New Haven, Connecticut, Bush’s birthplace.

Bush graduated with a degree in history in 1968; Kerry finished his studies in political science two years before.

At that time, female students were not yet admitted and foreign students were relatively few and far between. Today women account for half the student body.

It was also a period when campus societies were extremely popular including the secret “Skull and Bones” club, of which Bush and Kerry were members.

While Bush was known more for his social activities, Kerry used Yale to take his first steps on the political ladder, becoming president of the Union debating club like many future politicians before him.

Bush joined the Yale chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, whose current president, Richard Shanor, said he was “very proud” to have a “brother” in the White House.

“This university brings out in people a political awareness that I don’t think exists in a lot of universities,” Shanor said.

Foltz agreed that Yale continued to view itself as a place that prepares people for leadership.

“If Yale tries to pretend that it’s not an elite institution it looks foolish,” Foltz said. “It really is. That’s been constant. What has changed is the nature of the elite. It is much more cosmopolitan than it was before.”